My experience with AirBnb has been good but often I feel I miss something. If possible I always almost choose a hotel, because it seems cleaner, service oriented, often has breakfast and a place to have a drink or a coffee.
There are places that is more suitable for renting a private place, but in where there are tourists there are often better offers at hotels.
In the beginning it was nice, you could actually meet interesting people. Now it mostly feels anonymous and impersonal, often you end up sharing an apartment with two or three other tenants and the landlord doesn’t even show up once. I prefer hotels now, price-wise the difference to AirBnB isn’t very large.
In Austin, TX Airbnb incontrovertibly revealed that hotel room volume was insufficient for demand and was suppressing tourism and its inflow of outside cash.
The common complaint about insufficient & overpriced hotels stopped being theory and was proved out by an elastic federated supply that _at least initially_ put more money in the hands of private parties.
High cost of entry for building hotels in the urban core & decrepit central planning suppressed the cities growth for years. At first hotel companies and their "advocates" complained, but then after they realized it wasn't going to go away, the cranes showed up and started addressing the real problem.
I don't know if Airbnb will be forever, but things like it should at least be cyclically introduced to reveal infrastructure and planning failures, then local private parties can solve the problem and profit while planning commissions try to keep up.
I'm the opposite, as well. We recently visited the US for a month - our travel agent booked hotels in Anaheim and San Diego for us, and we used Airbnb for the rest. The first hotel was fine, but barely. The second was horrendous - it stank, the carpets were wet and so dirty our socks turned black. We bailed and booked an Airbnb. All the Airbnbs that we booked were at least as good as we expected them to be, usually better.
It's the same story at home in Australia.
The caveat, perhaps, is that as a family of 6 we have trouble finding hotel rooms. We also usually book out full places, and want no interaction with the host unless things go wrong.
There are places that is more suitable for renting a private place, but in where there are tourists there are often better offers at hotels.