Airbnb

Airbnb is presented as a booking platform whose influence reaches beyond finding a place to stay: its host profiles, service expectations, and guest-feedback culture shape the terms on which hospitality is offered and received. In two different stays, the platform connects travelers with private homes, while the small acts and awkward silences within those homes expose the limits of hospitality as a managed service.

Booking and the Host Profile

In the third week of September 2017, the narrator booked a room through Airbnb while visiting a dear old friend receiving treatment at a local hospital. The host’s profile described her as a retired librarian, a widow, a mother of four, and a grandmother of six, with interests in cooking and theater. She lived on the top floor of a small condominium about two miles from the hospital. The profile and booking placed the narrator inside a domestic setting rather than a conventional hotel, but the tidy guest room—with its plush rugs, layered pillows, down duvet, dried flowers, and paperback mysteries—felt stifling to her rather than welcoming.

Hospitality and Guest Feedback

The listing had promised a cat, but no cat appeared during the narrator’s stay. Only as the narrator was leaving did the host explain brusquely that the cat had died between the booking and the visit, then change the subject. The narrator sensed that the host’s manner might be inviting a question about the loss, yet also considered another possibility: the host may have been concerned that a guest would later complain about being told too much about a dead pet. The platform’s guest-facing conventions thus hover over a private moment of grief. What might have been an ordinary exchange between people is recast as a potential problem of customer satisfaction and public comment.

Superhost Rentals

In another stay, Airbnb’s role is marked by the hosts’ designation as Superhosts. Before leaving for Europe, they sent directions and a code for unlocking the front door. The house was presented as advertised and stocked with practical provisions, including coffee, tea, juice, yogurt, bread, extra bedding, and firewood; flowers had been placed in the bedrooms. These details suggest a highly prepared form of welcome, in which the hosts anticipate guests’ needs even while absent. Across the two stays, Airbnb links domestic intimacy to systems of description and evaluation: the profile promises a home, the hosts prepare one, and both sides remain aware that the experience may be judged.