Growing up in Singapore, I thought I'd seen most of my country — a city-state just slightly smaller than the size of New York City.
27.08.2024 - 16:11 / insider.com
As the founder of a travel site, Michael Rozenblit and his partner Maggie have stayed in hundreds of Airbnbs over the past decade.
"We love the convenience of having our own space," Rozenblit told Business Insider. "Particularly when it comes to cooking our own meals and having a bit more comfort than is found in a typical hotel room."
But after recent trips, Rozenblit said they have both "fallen out of love" with the platform. They claim places to stay on Airbnb are more expensive now than hotels, and hosts are not even providing toilet paper, trash bags, and coffee anymore.
Rozenblit said cleaning fees are also extortionate, despite hosts demanding that guests do the chores. One host previously told BI he charges $400.
"There are almost always over-the-top cleaning requirements for check-out, often including the requirement to take out the trash and strip the beds at the minimum," Rozenblit said.
Travelers have become wise to this apparent shift. Airbnb was once hailed as a major disruptor of the vacation industry, allowing people to stay in cities all over the world in comfort and at a price tag much lower than costly hotels.
But the pendulum has swayed the other way, with some holiday-makers now tired of the endless fees, and difficult hosts who can make their stays miserable, say experts.
Locals in tourist hot spots, including Barcelona and Athens, have also protested overtourism this year, taking aim at the platform's hosts buying up properties and pricing them out.
Airbnb warned investors of dwindling customer demand in an earnings call earlier this month, BI reported, and lowered its projected earnings for Q3 from $3.8 billion to between $3.67 billion and $3.73 billion.
The company's revenue is also down 15% compared to this quarter last year, from a net income of $650 million to $555 million.
Airbnb's stock has since tanked, falling 14% in one day earlier this month.
Meanwhile, hotels have bounced back, with former Airbnb fanatics returning and some seeing pre-pandemic levels of occupancy, according to Statistica. The industry is expected to see an annual growth rate of 3.72% until 2029, when it is anticipated to be worth $511 billion, according to Statistica data.
Experts say hosts have a lot to answer for in Airbnb's downfall.
Grace Moser, the owner of the women's lifestyle blog Chasing Foxes, has been a full-time traveler since 2016 and believes hosts have played "a huge role in Airbnb's crash."
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"Airbnb essentially allows anyone to sign up to be a host, which will always prove to be problematic," she told BI. "Because when you have people flooding in year after year who are seeing it as a way for them to make quick cash, you're going to be met with bad customer service."
Growing up in Singapore, I thought I'd seen most of my country — a city-state just slightly smaller than the size of New York City.
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Koji, the mold that transforms soy beans and wheat into soy sauce and rice into sake, is so beloved in Japan that it has its own holiday. And lately, chefs have been finding new uses for the fungus, which has a fruity aroma and an ability to make “anything it touches better,” says Jeremy Umansky, 41, the owner of Larder deli in Cleveland. He uses koji for almost everything: to cure pastrami; to ferment Chinese-style black beans, which are ground and swirled into chocolate babka to embolden the chocolate; and to sprinkle over salads and fries in the form of what the restaurant calls Special K, a seasoning of dried ground koji. “It’s a harmonizer,” he says. Bartenders, too, are taking note. At Nancy’s Hustle in Houston, the bar manager, Zach Hornberger, 32, adds it to the nonalcoholic Silver Brining cocktail, a sweet-sour-salty mix of pickle brine, grapefruit and lime juices, koji and tonic. “It brings this umami background to beverages, and it plays well with citrus, taming the high acid notes and rounding the drink as a whole,” he says. At the restaurant Fête in Honolulu, the bar manager, Fabrice McCarthy, 41, infuses rum with shio koji (a slurry of koji, water and salt) and shakes it into a mai tai to add salinity — the effect, he says, is similar to how salted peanuts make you want to drink more beer. Ryan Chetiyawardana, 40, the owner of the bar Lyaness in London, experiments with koji in multiple forms — for one cocktail, he ferments parsnips with koji, which he says unlocks the sweetness and delivers “a huge tropical brightness.” While koji often plays a supporting role, at Paradiso in Barcelona, it wraps around the entire lip of the glass used for the Fleming, named for Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, another influential mold. For this fungus-inspired cocktail, which includes grapefruit, tequila and miso, the manager of Paradiso’s research lab, Matteo Ciarpaglini, 30, one-upped a classic salt rim with a fluffy cloud of koji, its floral fragrance accompanying every taste. —
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