Why We Are Heading Back To Hotels
Booking a holiday is difficult enough without worrying whether the Airbnb is actually living up to the standard you expect. Kerri Sackville and Jenna Price reveal why people are heading back to hotels instead.
Early in 2022 I booked a stay in Northern NSW for January 2023. I did my due diligence. I spent hours online, reading reviews and comparing prices and features. I decided on a two-bedroom managed property with an onsite pool. Terrific reviews and a surprisingly reasonable rate. There was no Wi-Fi included, but I was used to compromising. You never get everything you want. I’ve stayed in a beautiful Airbnb that was absolutely ideal but for the fact that there was no door on the (pristine) toilet. I’ve stayed in a huge Airbnb with not one but two bidets, but almost no power points, and light switches in bizarrely inconvenient positions. And I’ve stayed at a terrific resort in which room cleaning was not included in the price, and I had to beg for clean towels after the fourth night.
So Wi-Fi wasn’t an issue. I booked the property and forgot about it till about a week before we were due to leave. A lot can change in a year. When I returned to the website to check if the property had a microwave, I noticed a negative review. Hopefully, just an anomaly, I thought, and did a deep dive.