There's a bit of both going on: AirBnB is used by regular people renting out a spare room of a house or apartment they occupy, which sometimes has a vaguely cou

There's a bit of both going on: AirBnB is used by regular people renting out a spare room of a house or apartment they occupy, which sometimes has a vaguely couchsurfing-but-not-free feel to it. But it's also used by fly-by-night hoteliers running illegal hotels and hostels. And lately, it's also used by legal vacation-rental brokers as a competitor to VRBO/Homeaway/etc. The marketing materials obviously prefer to emphasize the first, but the second category does a lot of volume (the percentage seems to vary heavily by city). What's most annoying as an occasional user is that it's sometimes very difficult to determine which is which: is this someone's spare room (may actually lead to friendly personal interaction, probably won't cause significant problems for the neighbors), is it one of 50 "spare rooms" that this person is operating as a black-market business (impersonal, likely to be contributing to neighborhood social problems), or is it a VRBO-type rental unit just cross-listed on multiple sites' inventory (impersonal, but at least probably legit)? You can sometimes guess by looking at their other listings, but some people split their operation across a bunch of accounts. AirBnB could probably make life harder for people running the larger-scale operations if they wanted to, emphasizing the site's focus on lodging rented out by regular people, which could bring the site a bit more in line with the marketing copy. But I don't think that's the likely trajectory.