To Air BnB or Not to Air BnB

My wife Chris and I just returned from a wondrous two-week journey to Spain, our first in that remarkable country. We visited Madrid, Cordoba, Seville, Ronda and Grenada, staying in lovely Air BnB rentals in the heart of each of those cities for a few days. Our hosts were helpful and proactive (one young woman even met our car on the street, walked ahead of us down to our parking space three floors down in a garage, then led us up to our third-floor apartment, where she demonstrated its amenities, and pointed out local shopping). The apartments were beautifully appointed with modern kitchens and baths, and just steps away from the primary sites we’d come to see. Our neighbors were courteous, too (for instance, during the Madrid blackout, when the electronic keypad on our front door failed, a kind young man noted our distress from his balcony and came down to let us in).

So what’s the problem, then?

Well, after booking these apartments (months ago) and beginning to read up on current events in Spain, I learned of a severe housing crunch across the country, with some of the blame going to corporations that have been buying up apartments to use as short-term (ie, Air BnB) rentals, forcing out longtime residents and forcing up rental prices, especially in the prime tourist destinations. In Barcelona and Malaga this spring protestors marched; Barcelona and the Canary Islands have put short-term rental restrictions in place; and the federal government has instituted new paperwork for renters intended to lessen tourist demand. Though no one said anything to us, clearly by going the Air BnB route in Spain, we were part of the problem.

We’ve been renting Air BnB apartments for at least a decade. Our online profile dates back to a Richmond, VA staycation in 2014, and I’m pretty sure we’d used them before then. We never go big -- I try to rent places priced similarly to hotels in the area – but we go the Air BnB route, because we like to make our own breakfasts, to pretend we’re not just passing through, and as a writer, I’m also a snoop, and in the early days, when we were renting people’s actual homes, seeing how others furnished their places was fascinating. We’ve met some lovely homeowners that way, too. On a 2016 journey in France, a retired professor laid out white Beaujolais and cheese for us in his Lyon kitchen and gave us a lesson in the city’s history; later that trip, near Bordeaux, the young couple who rented us a spare suite in their modest country home took us out to dinner with friends. And we’ve been lucky in the fascinating variety of homes as well. During a conference in New Orleans, we rented a French Quarter carriage house appointed in antiques; in Hoboken, we stayed in a railroad flat that was so much like the little apartment we’d first shared in the day, and in Monteverde, Costa Rica, we had a cottage on a hill frequented by coatimundi’s and even a resplendent quetzal. These are experiences no hotel could have given us.

But over the years, Air BnB has changed. Now it seems that most of the apartments are all set up similarly, neatly furnished, well appointed, but with little personality. Clearly, no one really lives in any of the places we stayed at in Spain. And it’s pretty clear that “hosts” nowadays are often hired to manage apartments for the corporations that own them, though they still need to pretend that these places are theirs. It starts to feel a little creepy, especially having learned about the housing pressures these rentals put on locals (the week after we stayed at that delightful time warp of a carriage house in New Orleans, the city put a stop to all short-term rentals in the French Quarter).

So what to do?

The best advice I’ve heard is to seek out Mom & Pop hotels and BnB’s when traveling, thus sharing our tourist dollars most directly with local people. I think that’s what we’ll try next time we travel. We’ll miss making our own breakfasts, yes, but we’ll feel less like Ugly Americans.

Btw, do you Air BnB? In comments, please share your thoughts. Thanks and happy trails!