how is this different to a hotel? When you buy time at a hotel, you're buying a bundle of services. You're getting a room, with a door that locks. You're getti

how is this different to a hotel? When you buy time at a hotel, you're buying a bundle of services. You're getting a room, with a door that locks. You're getting regular cleaning service, even if you don't need/want it. You're getting a private bathroom. You're getting privacy from the locals even if you don't need/want it. You're getting geographically limited because you can only get a hotel room in a place where the economics support building a hotel that has at least a few dozen rooms. I mean, hotels that have only one or two rooms aren't very profitable. Which means that hotels tend to concentrate in central business districts and other places where land is expensive. The point is, all these features that are bundled together have real costs. If you don't need those features, then you ideally you shouldn't have to pay for them. This is sort of like asking why Zipcar is different from a rental car company. There are efficiency gains to be had in a system where individual cars are scattered all over a city and where customers rent them by the hour as opposed to forcing customers to rent cars by the day from a centralized airport location.