When You’re Traveling, Does an Airbnb Beat a Hotel?

Here, two writers argue the finer points of each side of this divisive debate.

Yes, a short-term rental gives you privacy, freedom and more room

I am the kind of impossible contrarian who hates a nice hotel. Or, to put it another way, my personal-best travel moments of late have involved an Airbnb.

It wasn’t always this way. When my ex-husband and I were young and in love, we spent countless hours flipping through a coffee-table book on Asian hotels and dreaming of lounging by an infinity pool in Bali or sleeping in a treehouse in Thailand. Places like the Four Seasons and Amangiri beckoned—and we eventually made those dreams a reality.

Yet for me such places looked and felt similar: the icebox-climate control; the spotless Mercedes buses; the liveried staff offering us chilled bottles of water through the bars of our elegant cages. Sure, there was glamour in being there—but look into the infinity pool, and you see only yourself staring back, wondering why you’re there and exactly when you’ll get out to see the sights you’ve come to explore.

So I still flip, but now it’s through listings for places that are more casual and less mediated. I can live without $50 plates of eggs from room-service and bed sheets hand-stitched by the local women’s collective.

In return, I’ve felt the exhilaration of travel, which for me means being away from it all on my own terms. I’ve stayed in a glamping tent on the teal-green rapids of the White Salmon river in Washington state, where I cooked my own food outside, ate granola in the chill mist at dawn and dozed in the afternoon to the overheard conversations of people floating by on rafts. Later, I moved to a tiny farmhouse on a regenerative farm in Dufur, Ore., surrounded by a sea of yellow grass out of an Andrew Wyeth painting. The farmer had baked me a loaf of bread and stocked my refrigerator with fresh-picked vegetables and a local microbrew beer.

These experiences were not packaged or predictable or risk-free—and they were better for it. Home rentals are also practical, giving you the holy trinity of “more space, more amenities, more privacy" for your dollar, said Matthew Orley, CEO of Red Cottage, which handles exclusive short-term rentals in the Northeast. For a family or group, even a luxurious short-term home rental saves money.

I’d take even a ho-hum short-term rental place over a good hotel. It’s difficult to choose otherwise once you’ve penetrated the hotel illusion. —Valerie Stivers

No, an Airbnb stay means you do all the work—not exactly relaxing!

I’m not much of a do-it-yourselfer. I don’t cobble my own shoes, fill my own cavities or smoke my own bacon. The important things in life, I leave to the pros. Which is why I choose a hotel over an Airbnb any day.

A hotel is much more than a place where I can find a bed and hot running water when I’m far from home. It provides an experience that’s greater than the sum of its parts. In a great hotel, I wake up and, like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, find myself changed. Not into a bug, but into someone equally unrecognizable. For starters, I greet the day with a smile and a sense of optimism. I, who dislike both breakfast and buffets, get up early at Hotel Adlon Kempinski in Berlin, for first dibs at the breakfast buffet, which approaches the length of an airport runway and offers three types of caviar, 12 types of bread, 19 choices of tea, honey straight from the comb, and enough fish, meat, cheese and exotic fruits to make a kaiser blush.

If travel is a race to escape the tedium of daily life, hotels give you a big head start. “At hotels, you don’t have to worry about changing the beds, doing laundry, anything," said Sarah Miller, author of “Where Architects Sleep: The Most Stylish Hotels in the World." When I recently stayed at London’s Langham, I returned to my room to find that housekeeping had not just cleaned it, but had neatly bundled my computer cords and secured them with fasteners, organized my jumble of toiletries with military precision, and even placed a fresh microfiber cloth (in signature Langham pink) next to my reading glasses on the nightstand.

At an Airbnb, you’re greeted by a list of house rules and, if you’re lucky, a binder with suggestions for where to eat. By contrast, when my spouse and I arrived at the 10-room Taj Nadesar Palace in Varanasi, India, we were greeted by the resident temple priest, who blew a conch shell, showered us with rose petals, recited a mantra and draped beads of clay from the Ganges around our necks.

We hotel lovers are in good company: In a 2023 Morning Consult poll of U.S. adults, more than half said they would stay in a hotel if traveling for leisure, versus 7% who said they would choose a short-term rental. Let’s not forget that Mary and Joseph only stayed in the stable, an Airbnb forerunner, because there was no room at the inn.

In even the best Airbnb, I am an inhabitant of someone else’s space, an invader of sorts, meaning I never fully relax. But a hotel is purpose-built to extend hospitality to strangers. The guest is its sole focus.

My family and I witnessed that singular form of hospitality 15 years ago, when my mother died suddenly in a Savannah hotel room, while vacationing with my father. The bellman, who was also a minister, prayed with and checked in on him, until my sister and I arrived. I’ve never looked at hotels—or bellmen—in quite the same way since.