> The boutique hospitality market is already looking for ways to mimic the feel of Airbnb rooms and attempting to emulate "belonging" for travelers who are sick

> The boutique hospitality market is already looking for ways to mimic the feel of Airbnb rooms and attempting to emulate "belonging" for travelers who are sick of generic looking hotel rooms. The boutique hospitality market has been offering cozy, friendly, distinctive places for people to stay since long before AirBnB was founded. And besides, despite what the company's marketing department would have you believe, AirBnB accommodations are mostly generic apartments stocked with Ikea furniture. Sometimes they're creepily full of someone else's personal stuff. I've never known anyone who rented an AirBnB in order to get a sense of "belonging" in a new place. From what I've seen, people stay at AirBnBs for two reasons: price and location. You can often get a roof over your head - or a bigger roof under which more people can sleep - for less money than at a hotel. Also, you often can find AirBnBs in neighborhoods without many hotels - perhaps because hotels have been banned in those areas. Whatever effect AirBnB has had on housing markets in various cities - and I suspect it's frequently exaggerated - I understand why people want to restrict them. A steady stream of short-term guests staying in the apartment down the hall can be a huge nuisance. You feel less safe in your own building with so many complete strangers wandering through. Maybe you get woken up by partying tourists playing loud music late at night. And maybe those tourists make a mess in your building, which they see as more or less interchangeable with a hotel. More than anything else though living next door to an AirBnB can be annoying because it's just not something you signed up for when you moved in. You thought all your neighbors would be part of the community, but then all of a sudden the apartment down the hall turned into a commercial establishment. Don't get me wrong. AirBnBs can be great. The company offers a totally worthwhile service. And the hotel lobby has done some pretty darn sleazy things to try to fight off AirBnB. It's just that in stark contrast to, say, the taxi regulations that Lyft and Uber have been pushing against a lot of the regulations around renting rooms that AirBnB has run up against are perfectly understandable. > More "sharing economy" companies will... I realize you're using scare quotes, but still, I gotta say, the phrase "sharing economy" is so absurdly misleading. Seeing it is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. Companies like AirBnB, and Lyft and Uber, have nothing to do with sharing. They're marketplaces for small-scale commercial transactions. I think a much better way to describe this overall phenomenon is the "access economy" [0] which describes the effect of all these informal marketplaces from the consumer's perspective. [0] - https://alexdanco.com/2015/02/02/the-rise-of-the-access-economy https://alexdanco.com/2015/02/02/the-rise-of-the-access-econ...