Staying with strangers

Michelle Smith of Asheville, N.C., recently rented her basement apartment to a couple of strangers on vacation from Oregon. They came with a special request: Could she perform their wedding during their stay?

A licensed minister, Smith, 50, recruited a few neighbors as witnesses, found the bride a dress downtown, and officiated their wedding in the city’s botanical gardens. Wanting to spare the newlyweds her normal charge, she asked what they might offer in return. The husband said he was a massage therapist. “I want your most rock-star massage ever,” Smith told him, and that’s exactly what she got for the next two hours in her living room.

Smith is part of a growing movement that is changing how people travel. Using websites like Airbnb, Smith and other homeowners throughout the United States rent out spare rooms and houses to guests who value adventure and economy over consistency and safety. Since 2008, Airbnb has accommodated more than 11 million guests and, with a $10 billion valuation, is worth more than some major hotel chains like Hyatt and Wyndham. Facing new competition, many conventional hotels are tweaking their business models to appeal to anti-cookie-cutter travelers.

That trend is readily apparent in Asheville, N.C., a long-time vacation destination. (The city’s minor league baseball team is called the Tourists.) In 2012, more than 9 million tourists came to experience the area’s outdoor sports, craft beer, bohemian culture, Christian retreat centers, and Biltmore House, the largest residence in the United States. Those travelers added $2.3 billion to the area’s economy and are the object of intense interest among the hotels and hotel alternatives we visited to get a sense of the changing market and what it says about a changing America.

Airbnb has more than a half-million listings in more than 30,000 cities around the world, including 400 in Asheville. Hosts and guests both have online profiles. Michelle Smith first listed her basement on Airbnb in 2012. She priced it at $49 a night and, within two hours of launching her account, had a booking. The demand has never faltered. Today she has, at most, five unbooked nights a month from spring through fall.

Guests like not only the affordability of Smith’s room but also her spacious yard planted by a local farmer. One visitor who arrived this summer enjoyed the quacking of her ducks and the dozens of snap peas she offered while tossing swiss chard and kale in the sauté pan, rotten cilantro in the compost bin, and cabbage in a jar full of vinegar. Smith began offering rentals as a last resort: “It saved my ability to stay in my home.”

Guests often choose Smith’s apartment after seeing online how she ranks against other Asheville hosts: They can see how fast she responds to guests and whether they rate their stays positively. Sometimes that system fails, and some of Airbnb’s 600,000 global listings have led to nightmares for a few unsuspecting travelers. The service doesn’t run background checks on hosts, and some guests have complained about owners who came home drunk, turned up with criminal records, or tried to swindle them during online reservation. Some hosts, in turn, have complained after guests held orgies, stole stuff, or trashed their rentals.

Smith and others operate within restrictions. City codes in tourist hot spots like New Orleans, San Francisco, and Asheville forbid renting a whole house or apartment for fewer than 30 days. Those codes are often unenforced, but New York City authorities fined Nigel Warren $40,000 in 2012 for leasing out his apartment on Airbnb while he vacationed in Colorado. An appeals court later dismissed the case, but against-code rentals and evasions of hotel taxes continue to breed controversy (see “A room of one’s own,” Dec. 14, 2013).

Airbnb users may wind up saddled with more responsibility than they bargained for. One photographer on the road for a shoot booked a room in Atlanta, Ga., only to find that good food and coffee were a two-hour trip away through downtown traffic. She also found bedbugs under her sheets, but the host bought her medicine and helped clean her belongings to beat back the tiny pests. Hosts are also sometimes surprised: A young host in Los Angeles, Calif., had to find drain cleaner after renting out her studio space to a guest who managed to clog her bathtub with hair.

One guest’s stay became a matter of life and death. Asheville Airbnb host Robyn Blakely was asleep at her fiancé’s house when her father, living at the rental spot, awoke around midnight with chest pain. The guest heard his cries and drove him to the hospital, where doctors performed quadruple bypass surgery to save his life. Blakely arrived at 2 a.m. after spotting a frantic text message from her guest.

FRUGAL TRAVELERS also make use of a traditional alternative: hostels. Those willing to give up privacy can stay in the heart of downtown Asheville for as little as $28 a night. Sweet Peas hostel shares a renovated old paper factory with breweries, bars, and boutiques. Lodgers choose among three options: a bunk in a room full of bunk beds, a pod or cubby-like bed with a heavy curtain they can draw for privacy, or a private room with a sink and a locking door. All guests share a common shower room, kitchen, dining room, and living room.

Sweet Peas has midnight to 8 a.m. quiet hours, but the open-air design means if someone snores or comes in drunk at 2 a.m., everyone knows it. But community experience has its positives: Manager Sarah Dostal fondly remembers Christmas last year when she and some of the guests shared sushi around the tree in the common area. She called such meetings “the best and worst part, because you can develop some really nice friendships, and then those people go away.”

Across the United States in California, the Banana Bungalow hostel chain shares a food theme and low prices (as little as $34 per night for a dorm bed in the summer) with Sweet Peas—but guests at the Maui or Hollywood locations trade Asheville’s mountain air and hippie culture for West Coast heat, tiki bars, free body board rentals, and Pacific sands.

Another Asheville hostel, Bon Paul & Sharky’s (named after owner Joe Gill’s two goldfish), typically has lodgers between 18 and 35 years old, with one-third coming from outside the United States. Bunks cost $26 per night, and Gill tries to cultivate conversation among guests by scheduling potlucks, establishing common rooms and decks with games and maps of Asheville, and having a fire pit out back. Bunks have mismatched sheets and sometimes roommates are mismatched too, but many leave their photos on the kitchen fridge, their dreams in a “dream book,” and their quirky character in memories.

Julie Esh, the founder of Hostel Earphoria in Chicago, Ill., uses Airbnb and other websites to rent her rooms for $25 per night. Almost anyone can afford her prices, but not everyone can stay: She only welcomes musicians and music lovers into the small, white guesthouse. Visitors to Earphoria will find drum kits, guitar amplifiers, an antique piano, and pricey production software for their use in the converted studio, not to mention free bread and eggs for breakfast.

Some Airbnb rentals are considerably more expensive, with private rooms at $100 or more, but they are usually a better buy than similar hotel rooms. Hoteliers often have mixed feelings about Airbnb competitors, but particularly want them to pay hotel taxes: Christian Hickl of Asheville’s Sweet Biscuit Inn says, “I don’t mind their business. I just think it should be a level playing field.” Hickl’s seven bedrooms, which mix hotel elegance with hostel quirkiness, go for $139-199 per night, and a local carpenter used old wood from the Grove Park Inn (see sidebar below) to build the bed in Room 1.

Robyn Blakely, whose father had the emergency heart surgery, knows the Hickls on a friendly basis, yet keeps one small secret: “They don’t know I run an Airbnb.” But vacation rentals in city after city across the United States are no longer a secret: Many travelers, before checking hotel websites, now go to Airbnb, VRBO, CouchSurfing, or a dozen other start-up competitors in what has become a brave new traveling world.

Upscale reaction

Affluent travelers seeking to avoid unexpected lodging experiences stay at upscale hotels like the 101-year-old Grove Park Inn in Asheville, N.C. With 513 rooms and 1,000 employees, it’s three miles but worlds away from the $49 basement room. A club suite on the adults-only floor runs up to $1,000 per night. The average room costs $250 on most days but $320 in late November when the inn hosts the annual National Gingerbread House Competition, packing the halls with “a quarter-mile of gingerbread.”

Some upscale hotels that face competition from usually friendly homeowners are trying to be less stuffy. At Aloft, a downtown Asheville hotel (part of a nationwide chain) that charges $289-389 per night on a summer weekend, staffers go through “vibe training” and aim for a culture of “hipness.” When staffers learned they would be housing WWII veterans, they put RC Colas and MoonPies wrapped in American flags in their rooms as a welcoming surprise. —R.H. and E.S.

—Ryan Hill and Emily Scheie are 2014 World Journalism Institute graduates; Tiffany Owens and Sophia Lee supplied additional reporting