The Airbnb Killer (The Best Thing I've Discovered This Year)
As long-time readers know, I caps-italics-bold HATE Airbnb.
Like, with a raging biblical hate.
Romans 12:9 — “Hate was is evil; hold fast to what is good.”
The very nature of Airbnb, like all forms of for-profit land-lording and for-profit lending, is evil.
Airbnb is particularly insidious because landlords outbid local families for homes, then turn would-be family homes into unregulated and unstaffed hotels that destroy the fabric of communities.
The result? It’s left millions of families homeless, made shelter for expensive for everyone else, and leaves thousands of villages ghost-towns in the off-season.
I don’t hate Airbnb hosts and I don’t hate Airbnb guests, but I hate that anyone is sociopathic enough to look objectively and the situation and still plow ahead with making families homeless.
It’s the exact sort of thing Jesus sends people to hell for (Matthew 25:31–46.)
I’ve written against Airbnb at length if you want to know the truth of how genuinely evil and perverse it is:
An Open Letter to Airbnb Users
Airbnb Is the Crassus of Real Estate
At this point, I’ve said basically everything I want to say about Airbnb.
It needs to die.
It needs to be killed, along with every other form of for-profit lending.
People matter more than extractive profit.
We need better things to replace it.
I wrote on Facebook a few weeks ago:
Imagine a business that was Airbnb but free.
We could call it Sharebnb.
A friend DM’d me and said:
Have you ever heard of Home Exchange?
Yes, the same Home Exchange from the Christmas movie The Holiday.
I’d seen it two decades earlier, but it didn’t have a ton of homes on it at the time, and it was only possible to do synchronized reciprocal swaps.
In other words, it had very limited optionality at the time.
Little did I know that they merged with another startup a year or two later, cracked non-synchronized and non-reciprocal swaps, and the thing has exploded.
Today, you can stay in 500,000+ homes across 155 countries.
Basically, you sign up, create a profile for your home, pay your membership fee, and then you can either:
a.) reciprocally swap houses with people all over the world, or
b.) you can book places using your Guest Points (GP) to stay at people’s houses even if they aren’t staying at yours.
Every time someone stays at your place non-reciprocally, they give you Guest Points which you can then spend on nights elsewhere.
We’ve already stayed in Oxford on a reciprocal swap, and just booked two nights by the beach in the Lake District for our 18th anniversary this weekend on points from our initial signup.
If you like to travel but don’t like supporting Airbnb or wasting money on hotels, so this is a no-brainer for free accommodations.
Use my referral code alanandamy-7a225 (it’s my middle name and my wife’s middle name) and we both get an extra 250 points (which gets you an extra 1–2 nights of free accommodations.)
I used my friend’s code when I signed up. The cost for one year was £190/U$235, and with all the bonuses, it got us a total of 1550 points once we were fully set up. (We got 250 free points for using the referral link, 650 free points for setting up our profile… so we’d earned six free nights prior to even buying a membership… and 650 points for becoming a paid+verified member.)
So for U$235, you get 7–10 nights of free accommodations, plus whatever extra swaps you do, plus whatever Guest Points you earn and spend.
The average family of four using Home Exchange saves over U$2,200 per year that would’ve gone to profiteers.
Note that hosts DON’T get the membership money. The money goes to the platform and they use it to run the thing and to insure your house up to $1 million in case a guest decides to burn it to the ground or whatever. It also pays for theft protection, cancellation protection, 24/7 emergency assistance, etc.
Our friends have used their points for a beachside place in Mexico, Istanbul, a yurt on Vancouver Island, all over the world. They’re currently in Taiwan on Guest Points while someone is at their place on Guest Points.
We have a family from France staying in ours on Guest Points while we’re in Wales in a few weeks, and we have a couple from Germany visiting in August on Guest Points, which we’re then using for a family summer holiday week by the Suffolk coast.
My suggestion? Sign up for free, set up your profile+house profile+ get verified to rack up points, then pay when you realize you’d be stupid not to!
It takes a minute to get the hang of it, but if you’re organized and methodical you can hack an unbelievable amount of free travel. The platform even connects you with an Ambassador to teach you have to maximize your holidays.
Most importantly, it kills Airbnb’s world-destroying business model.
No one spends any money for holiday accommodation
No landlords make a cent of profit
No landlord outbids a local family for their would-be house
No family is forced into homelessness
No house sits empty all off-season
No community gets torn apart
I love it as much as I hate Airbnb!