Airbnb is a reservation tool

During a recent road trip to Croatia we booked most of our accommodation through Airbnb. We hadn’t booked anything in advance and at the height of the summer season there were no cheap hotels left. Airbnb had much more choice and prices were reasonable if not cheap.

This was my first time of really using Airbnb and I was surprised to find out that all the apartments and rooms we booked were run by professional accommodation businesses. One was actually a hostel but really felt more like a hotel minus the breakfast.

I had an obviously erroneous image of Airbnb selection consisting of people renting out their flats but it seems these companies just use Airbnb as an additional sales channel. The same apartments could have been booked for example through booking.com.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It was just a bit surprising considering the image I had of Airbnb. It’s understandable that touristy cities have lots of apartments to rent and they are sold through any channel possible.

One downside of this is that many of the places we looked didn’t have reviews on Airbnb but they might have had on other booking sites. Airbnb also hides the exact location of the apartments prior to booking them which seems a bit unnecessary given they are not anyone’s homes. Anyway, one lesson learned again.