> people hate hotels.
Was this the case though?
Airbnb and hotels.com and the likes have been pushing the hotels towards a race to the bottom but actual hotels are not bad in my experience. Small quasi-hotels with ordinary flats that run like a estate get rich quick scheme are though.
I feel like Airbnb started more on the provider side as "fuck you landlord/local government I'll sublet if I want and you won't catch me" more than a fuck you to hotels specifically. Any "fuck you hotels" on the customer side was mostly on the price side - Airbnb was indeed cheaper when it was a bed, a towel and a plate in someone's flat rather than a specially-bought and renovated property where you never see the host except to pick up a key. Maybe the "meet real new people" thing had some legs at first for some gregarious types, but it clearly wasn't that important since it's mostly gone now. It bootstrapped into a whole property market thing when it turned out to be outrageously profitable in tourist areas and created a whole new supply of holiday let properties at the expense of local residential supply.
Hotels/Booking.com are more of a fuck you to travel agents and/or opaque or fragmented hotel pricing, since they don't provide an alternative to the hotel itself.
That's confusing things. There are bad, good and great hotels. There are bad, good and great airbnbs. The problem is what will the management of that place do or try to get away with; what can the client do; what can the intermediary / rating. That was already the case before Airbnb.
If an airbnb and a hotel choose to race to the bottom, perhaps they deserve each other and the rest of us deserve a way to avoid them? (Or use them if it came to that...)
I think Airbnb and hotels.com do not push people to the bottom - they offer a minimal bar or set of features to look for quality / price ratio. Are they perfect? No. But they make discovery much easier.