It now has quality hosts supply issue. Most of the places aren't designed or made for living, they were set up as bare minimum where you can crash on a bed (or, more likely, a couch) for the night and imaginatively call it "a comfy modern clean fully-equipped apartment close to everything" (where only the "apartment" bit will be actually true).
In 2019 it took me 30 minutes to scroll through a list and pick one of good places - or maybe I was just lucky.
In 2023 it takes over a week (I'm not exaggerating) of routine work every evening to find something that may somewhat match my requirements and wishes. All those filters except for price are now useless ("dedicated workspace" is a particularly bad joke), one literally has to skim over every single listing, review the photos and figure out what they really have. Honest good listings still exist but are drowned in sea of low-effort ones.
For a good portion of the airbnb market thats exactly what the guests want. They go, "I have 12 boys in new orleans for mardi gras, we are partying every day for a week straight, lets rent what is basically a frat house and make it cheap by sleeping 4 in a bedroom, and spend the savings on partying since the room is just where we pregame and pass out."
Sure, you can do this stuff in a hotel too, but sometimes the airbnb has cool stuff like a patio or a deck versus your bog standard hotel layout with too much bed and not enough floorspace for partying, not to mention a smoke detector. The lack of any staff oversight also makes it easy to party without fearing noise complaints or having staff see just how many people are staying in the unit. I'd wager airbnb has completely changed how big partying holidays like spring break works in a lot of cities for this reason.
Hm, maybe. It's very different from my typical forced-to-be-a-digital-nomad use case, which is "I need to be in $city/$country for {anything between 2 weeks and 4 months} and I want a private place to live in, with a comfy bed, proper kitchen with a large fridge, decent Internet, comfortable sturdy wooden desk with an ergonomic chair to work at, in a quiet area with a grocery store nearby". AKA home away from home, except that I surely won't find a proper coffee machine there (can't be helped), and that I'm having mini-vacations on holidays and weekends, exploring the new area.
The only alternative I know of is extended stay hotels, but those are extremely rare, especially outside the US. It used to be Airbnb was not just the only option, but also a blessing - I suppose because nomads were a major part of its guest client base. Now it feels like trying to find something tolerable in a pile of garbage.
In 2019 it took me 30 minutes to scroll through a list and pick one of good places - or maybe I was just lucky.
In 2023 it takes over a week (I'm not exaggerating) of routine work every evening to find something that may somewhat match my requirements and wishes. All those filters except for price are now useless ("dedicated workspace" is a particularly bad joke), one literally has to skim over every single listing, review the photos and figure out what they really have. Honest good listings still exist but are drowned in sea of low-effort ones.