It's also about facilities. Having a full kitchen and separate rooms makes a world of difference when you're traveling with kids.

Anecdotally, I've seen luxury/boutique hotels respond to the kitchen/separate rooms appeal by offering those features at competitive prices.

On the other end some hotel brands are pioneering smaller "pod" units to be more competitive with shared rooms/tiny apartments.

I'd generally assume that the economics of maintaining a 10-100 unit hotel are universally better than managing 3 single-family homes if you can maintain "feature-parity".

This is it for us as well. We always used to use VRBO for vacations for the same reason (and will likely return based on serial bad experiences with AirBnB).

I feel like a snob but I can't stand staying in hotels any more when I'm travelling for fun.

Just a microwave saves significant money as I only need to order one restaurant meal a day and can easily split it in two. I need to be very picky about what I can eat so if I found something I'd much rather not waste half of it.

So many hotel rooms don't feature microwaves. Sure, full kitchens are a fire hazard but a microwave?? Maybe because some has room service and want to push that instead? Or maybe they had room service it ceased but the lack of microwaves stayed like bugs in legacy codebases.

There seems to be two market segments for solo/duo travelers and families/large groups.

I’ve done the latter with big groups of friends and renting a nice house for a week is a great experience. But I think vacation rental homes of this sort existed well before airbnb

They did exist, but they're far more discoverable with airbnb et al.

There's also a significant group of people who thinks AirBnb works very well at the 2x-4x hotel price for a much nicer space. Hotels simply don't have enough of those rooms or if those rooms do exist they are considered to be <some ridiculously named set of> suites that are billed at ridiculous daily rate.

Edit - Examples pulled from the notes from 2019:

Paris - AirBNB $650 a night, 3rd story walk-up ~1900 sq feet apartment with a balcony. Hotel price for something similar? $12,442.00/night. Hotel for a basic room ( ~300sq feet) ? $220/night.

Barcelona - 2nd floor apartment in El Born. ~1500 sq feet. $590/night. 1500 sq feet room in a hotel? There were two in the entire city. Price? ~8k/night. Basic room in a hotel? $180/night. King room in a hotel ( ~370 sq feet! Amazing! ) $440.

I can go on and on.

At below hotel prices AirBnb competes with cockroach infested motels.

In Europe this is totally not true. I use Airbnb almost twice month when I travel to some tango event anywhere in Europe.

I always choose Airbnb because it is cheaper than an ok hotel but almost always better, never worse.

Outliers: gut feeling says less than 5% over 6 years.

This is how I see Airbnb in 2020. Big cities have cracked down on people renting out their places and all the idealist hosts have left. Hotels are getting cheaper to compete. The one thing that Airbnb still seems to be great at is ultra-trendy "experience" homes like solar-powered biodomes in the desert or cross-laminated timber cabins in the mountains.

Here, all my friends and my girlfriend are using airbnb for the reason that it is significantly cheaper than a hotel. If a hotel is only 10-15% more expensive, I also usually take the hotel.

Regarding the loss - airbnb is already mature and still generating so much loss? What a bad way to run a business. Would not invest.

AirBNB is group if you're traveling with a decent sized group. You can cook meals together, have a place to hangout, etc. As a solo traveler it's less good. Most of the time you either end up renting out an entire place for yourself (usually not cost effective compared to a decent hotel. Especially if you're paying a $50-$100 cleaning fee amortized across a 1-2 night stay), or renting a room in someone's house (which is cost effective but a bit of a crapshoot, especially if you like having your own space to decompress at the end of the day)

Also selection. You can get AirBnBs in a number of regions where hotels are just not available or may be fully booked up.

It's less true as more and more lazy landlords try to get on the bus.