Hotels are a specially designated category for temporary housing so that permanent residents can exclude travelers from their neighborhoods.
You aren't flipping it on its head at all, the reason hotels exist is because travelers exist and need somewhere to go.
Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the social contract that has created a designated place for people who are likely to not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?
I like the modern social contract and hotels, but to be fair, AirBNB is inverting what had already been inverted. In some sense, AirBNB is returning to the old model before hotels were everywhere. A traveler would reach a new town and ask for lodging in someone's home. In many countries, providing lodging to strangers is still the norm.
Em. Tourism has been a thing, complete with travel guides, tour operators, souvenirs made for tourists and tourist attractions for millennia.
Plenty of major destinations (holy places, resorts, etc) would bring in thousands of tourists at a time. The ancient Olympics, for instance, brought in tens of thousands of visitors.
Surely, those existed since ancient times, there's a reason why Romans had inns and waystations. There was some expectation to host strangers traveling as an act to please the gods, etc. but for any mass events there would be lodging at inns, camps, and so on... Not an expectation that everyone hosts thousands of strangers when they pour over for such events.
The scale is massively different, they didn't have millions of people coming through a city during the summer, like Paris, Barcelona, or Lisbon gets. Just Lisbon gets some 5-6x its population as tourists per year, it's in a very different scale to some tens of thousands in ancient times, which wouldn't expect the same relative level of amenities as modern tourists do.
Funny, in my experience Airbnb never captured the vacation home market to anywhere near the degree of the apartment in a popular city market. Where I am you still have a much better bet of finding a vacation home via the websites that existed previously than Airbnb.
Also there is a reason why places places with lots of vacation homes are considered expensive an dnot the most pleasant to live at permanently. That's why cities etc regulated, they dis not want them to turn into holiday parks.
And now they’re easy to find and everyone buys them for investment which crowds out community members.
The neighborhood social contract. The one where I know my neighbors and we build a vibrant community. Instead of the drunk idiots who show up for 3 days and throw their beer bottles on the ground.
Travel management companies and other business who rent property for tourism have been doing this for decades. I have several great small websites that had cabins or short term rentals in cities I frequent and I wasn’t getting killed my stupid cleaning prices or junk fees.
Some of the cabin rental companies I rent from have been around since the 90s.
"not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?"
What 'local norms' are so different that you won't understand them as a traveler? 99.9% of the population sleep and wake up at the same time. You just need to be a decent human being.
Yeah I don't buy OP's "local norms" argument but as someone who lived in the same building as an AirBnB it's inarguable to me that it affects the standard of living for others in the building.
The hallways got scuffed up, some guests were excessively noisy, dropped trash all over the place, broke stuff... as a permanent resident if you do that you face consequences. As someone only resident for a weekend it makes no difference to you.
Am I allowed to stay with a relative or a friend when I visit their town? I am totally ignorant of local norms, maybe I should be in the Holiday Inn next door instead?
The line got blurry with the advent of the internet. How do you define "friend"? First there was craigslist and house swapping, and then there was couchsurfing.com, and then came Airbnb, which injected a giant pile of money into the system and everything went haywire from there.
You aren't flipping it on its head at all, the reason hotels exist is because travelers exist and need somewhere to go.
Why does Airbnb think they have a right to invert the social contract that has created a designated place for people who are likely to not know local norms and be operating on strange hours?