We took a break recently, travelling abroad to see family. So today I am taking a break from my usual beat in tech, AI and geopolitics to relate a story from my trip, and what it means for travellers, including many who read this column.
As we have done for about 15 years, we booked our accommodation through Airbnb. Those readers who have done this might remember the best days of this service when booking a short-term rental felt like an act of civilised optimism. You went online to a friendly website, looked at some photos, saw an acceptable price and reserved the accommodation (which was generally far less than a hotel). Then you packed your bags, turned up at someone’s front door – a real someone, with bookshelves and framed family photographs and occasionally fresh milk and complimentary wine in the fridge.
The transaction was direct and smooth, the trust was mutual, and the whole encounter carried the agreeable sensation of having been let into a stranger’s life. This was the promise of Airbnb when it launched in 2008: a people’s hospitality network, a sharing economy made flesh, a civilised alternative to the anonymity of the corporate hotel chain. And it delivered.
Fast forward to our trip. One of our destinations was an island off Italy. When we booked, I was vaguely aware that there were some extra charges levied for cleaning fees. I didn’t look too closely and didn’t tally up the total, expecting it to be a small increment to Airbnb’s advertised price. On the day prior to arriving we checked in online to the Airbnb site. We were then hyperlinked to another site, a company I had never heard of, where we had to resubmit various documents.
I was then contacted by a stranger on my personal WhatsApp, who asked me to submit ID docs directly to him, and to bring cash for the extras including €300 for a ‘deposit’ in addition to €290 for other charges (which included a daily cleaning fee per person!). Failure to separate the garbage into plastics and metal, glass, cardboard and paper, and compost and then dispose of it at a municipal collection site would result in the forfeit of the deposit.
It was legit
I smelled scam. Contacted Airbnb. It was legit. We had no option, there was no time to rebook elsewhere and, without agreeing to terms, we would not be let in.
Many people who have booked a short-term rental in a European city in the past few years will recognise these symptoms: a listed price that bears almost no relation to what you actually pay once cleaning fees, service fees, city taxes, platform levies and – increasingly – sizeable security deposits are added to the bill. In some cases the supplementary charges rival the nightly rate itself. Barcelona, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Edinburgh; you arrive at checkout and you are likely to find that the flat you thought would cost €220 a night is actually costing you closer to €300, with an additional €300 sitting hostage in someone’s account
What has happened is a tale of market capture.
The original Airbnb model – a homeowner renting out a spare room or their apartment– was always going to attract investors. The economics were too compelling. By 2020, the supply of active Airbnb listings in the United States alone had begun a surge that would eventually reach 62 per cent above pre-pandemic levels.
The new hosts were not, in the main, people renting out the spare converted bedroom-office. They were investors running micro-portfolios of three to ten properties, often managed by third-party property management companies offering additional services, automated guest communications, and standardised interiors scrubbed of anything so inconvenient as personality.
The result, for the traveller, is the hotel experience but worse – the soulless interior of a mid-range business hotel and none of the always-available staffed infrastructure that comes with it. You get a key, a QR code inside the door and a set of online home instructions. And no-one to answer the phone immediately when the geyser fails (which it did in our case, eventually fixed).
A serious business
Industry analysts have taken to describing this transformation approvingly as “professionalisation”. The days of casual hosting, they report, are giving way to a new era in which successful operators treat their rental as a serious business. What this means in practice is that the human being who used to hand you the key and recommend a restaurant has been replaced by a property manager in a distant office running fifteen listings simultaneously.
The second force reshaping the market is municipal rebellion.
Cities across Europe have spent the better part of a decade watching their housing stock quietly converted from homes into investment vehicles, putting upward pressure on home prices and local rentals. The political blowback has been fierce and, in some places, absolute.
Barcelona announced in June 2024 that it would ban all short-term rentals entirely by 2028, a decision designed to return more than 10,000 properties to the residential market. New York City effectively achieved the same result through licensing requirements so onerous that the number of legal listings collapsed. Lisbon, Porto and Edinburgh have all introduced restrictions on new licences in high-pressure housing zones.
The image that seemed to crystallise the broader cultural moment came from Barcelona in 2024, when residents armed with water pistols descended on tourist-filled restaurant terraces, shouting “tourists go home.” The fury was not really about tourists – cities have tolerated tourists for centuries – but about a system that had quietly privatised the residential fabric of the city for the benefit of investors and platforms headquartered thousands of kilometres away.
Airbnb, with over 8.1 million listings globally, is no longer a scrappy disruptor. It is a dominant infrastructure company, and dominant infrastructure companies attract regulators.
Sustained negative press
For a period, the “extra fees” problem threatened to become an existential one for Airbnb and others. The gap between the displayed price and the final price – sometimes referred to in the industry as “junk fees” – generated sustained negative press and, eventually, regulatory attention. In late 2024, the US Federal Trade Commission announced a Junk Fees Rule requiring short-term rental platforms to display the full price upfront; it took effect in May 2025.
Airbnb had already begun to anticipate this. By April 2025, it had eliminated the ability for hosts to hide mandatory fees, making total price display the automatic global default. The cleaning fee, that particular irritant which in some cases exceeded the cost of a night’s stay, can no longer be sprung on the guest at checkout.
All well and good, except that in our case, we were committed by the “main” Airbnb price without having fully read and calculated the extra charges nestled at the bottom of the website.
But I suppose any regulation is progress of a kind, though it is worth noting that in the US it required federal regulators to achieve it. The platform has also, in the same period, removed more than 500,000 low-quality listings under an updated hosting quality system introduced in 2023 – a tacit acknowledgement that the surge in professional operators had introduced a layer of sub-standard inventory that was damaging the brand. Whether these interventions are sufficient to restore the original appeal of the product is another question entirely.
So, what of the weary traveller, looking for reasonably priced accommodation?
The market, even in the face of increasing regulation and local resistance, is not in collapse. Airbnb was up nearly 10 per cent on the prior year. The product still draws significant demand, particularly from families and groups for whom a hotel simply does not offer the right configuration of space, kitchen access, and privacy. The question is not whether the short-term rental survives (it will) but what it has become.
Charmless and scarce
And what it has become, in the cities that travellers most want to visit, is increasingly charmless and scarce.
Barcelona’s regulations will remove thousands of units from a city that was already supply-constrained. In the most-visited European cities, the traveller now faces a pincer movement: a reduced pool of legal short-term rental properties, dominated by professional operators charging hotel-adjacent prices with none of a hotel’s amenities or accountability.
The Radisson, in this context, is beginning to look reasonable.
It would be easy to sentimentalise what has been lost, and probably unwise. The original Airbnb was also, on occasion, chaotic, unreliable, and populated by occasionally testy hosts who left passive-aggressive notes about the towels in the cupboard. But it offered something that the industrialised version cannot replicate – the texture of actual habitation. A bookshelf tells you something, as does a wedding photo on the table. As does a local’s restaurant recommendations, scrawled on a Post-it note beside the kettle. These things have commercial value, but only if the person renting the flat actually lives there.
The “sharing” economy was always partly a fiction – a warm narrative draped over a transaction – but the fiction contained a truth. The investor-owned, professionally managed, dynamically priced short-term rental unit shares nothing with anyone. It is a hotel room without room service.
The fellow who contacted me by WhatsApp to request cash and personal documents turned out to be a sweet guy. It’s just that the company he worked for just took advantage of our inattention to detail, and extracted from us more money than we had expected to spend.
Caveat emptor.
[Image: ChatGPT]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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