Airbn' bust

Short-term lets have shaken up the tourism industry and housing markets. Now, authorities are clamping down but that’s far from the only issue confronting travellers and hosts.

- NOEL O’HARE

It was 40°C that day in Melbourne. We’d rented an Airbnb five minutes’ walk from South Yarra station. Now it seemed longer. The apartment was in a high-rise with access via a key in a lockbox. Sweat steaming my glasses, I struggled to align the entry code digits. The box clicked open but there was nothing inside. I poked at the empty space in disbelief. Then we noticed a bike rack garlanded with about 20 lockboxes. Kneeling in the dust, we tried one after another.

“You said there would be no problem,” my wife complained. It was time to contact the host, but roaming hadn’t kicked in on our phones. Frustrated, I grabbed my iPad and went in search of a cafe with free Wi-Fi. Two hours later, it was all sorted.

It’s unlikely we’ll use Airbnb again. After the hassle of airports and economy-class travel, we’re no longer up for the adventure of not knowing if we can access our lodgings and what we will find when we do. And we’re not alone.

There’s a growing disenchantment with Airbnb – once positioned as the alternative to impersonal, expensive hotels. In the US, hosts whose dreams of easy cashflow took a battering during Covid turned to social media early this year to vent about shrinking profit margins, partly caused by a glut of rentals. And around the world, local governments are clamping down on Airbnb and other short-term letting markets partly because of their contribution to high rental prices and the housing affordability problem.

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