Airbnb has important place in the travel industry; we’ve all benchmarked it and studied its model for years. However, its place is not in the private, luxury travel realm. In fact, far far from it. When clients come to me with a vision for their trip, Airbnb rarely comes up. When it does through, I always push back right away, primarily because quality is not something I can vet or control. My role as your travel consultant and experience curator is to create an journey of ease and comfort. Standing outside a padlocked door waiting in the sun for a WhatsApp response that may or may not come is not generally what I have in mind for them.

1. Booking an Airbnb is a coin toss

You may be getting more square footage or a private kitchen, but when it comes to luxury travel, these factors matter less than the feeling of being totally taken care of. With hotels, you are paying for a standard that is consistently maintained, for a seamless arrival, for service, for accountability when something goes wrong. These are the hallmarks of a hotel experience. Even a high-end Airbnb can only deliver this by luck.

With Airbnb, it’s significantly easier to end up in an awkward situation: an owner staying somewhere on the property (it is their home, after all) or forgetting to turn on the hot water tank. This happened to me once in Puglia, Italy, and I spent the entirety of my stay without hot water. Another time in Marrakech, I had to look past the grimy corners of the kitchen drawers each time I rummaged for cooking utensils, which were few and far between. These are the images that come to my head when my clients bring up Airbnb and a big reason why I only choose to work with a handful of private property owners, in places I have stayed at myself and with people whose standards I feel fully confident about.

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2. YallaH Sarah, but what about the reviews?

Again, whereas that can be useful in another setting, luxury travel is about something more than making sure 200 people haven’t complained publicly about their experience. (It has to be really bad for that to happen). The other important thing to note is that guests are reviewing their experiences relative to a price paid rather than to an objective standard. The tagline ‘stunning villa with incredible views’ doesn’t tell you anything about the thread count of their sheets or about the water pressure in the showers. These are things hotels actually look into. Whereas you know I have a thing about confusing shower heads, at least I know that there is someone to help me in case I really can’t figure it out. The same can’t be said for a private rental.

Despite what it may seem, I am not anti-rental. I am just against rentals as a default. As with most things, there are times and places where rentals could actually make sense: traveling with a large multi-generational family who all want to be under the same roof, sharing a kitchen or as a group of friends celebrating a milestone and who want to prioritize being together rather than sightseeing. The hotel industry still doesn’t cater to this market yet, so usually, in cases where there are more than 8 people traveling, I usually look into one of my pre-vetted private villas or at hotels that have a handful of private villas on their property. In the case of the latter, my clients can get the best of both worlds: the privacy and intimacy of staying together with the quality control that forms the basis of a hotel’s reputation.

3. Luxury travel has nothing to do with a price tag

It’s about experiencing a destination in a state of true relaxation. It means traveling without having to worry about logistics or quality so that you focus on what brought you there to begin with. Airbnb was not designed with this goal in mind. It was designed to be convenient and a 50/50 type of experience. You stay in a house, enjoy the views, and then pay the cleaning fees while also stripping the bedsheets before you leave. Quite the opposite of staying in places where people’s job is to make you feel comfortable and at ease.

So, please, let’s stop recommending Airbnb for luxury travel, at least when it comes to a Sarah Casewit designed trip. I cannot guarantee your experience will be exquisite and that bothers me to my core. I didn’t spend 15 years of my career checking suite after suite to place you in someone’s second home ♥️.