Airbnb sold us the comforts of home. Then came the chores

Schadenfreude isn’t listed among Airbnb’s amenities — but this week, it’s practically complimentary.

Some Airbnb hosts are threatening to quit the platform, raise their housekeeping fees or pare their rental properties down to the bare essentials rather than accept new restrictions on checkout chores. A segment of travelers, meanwhile, has greeted the uproar with the particular delight of people who have spent years paying cleaning charges while being handed lists of chores. “I’m just here with popcorn to watch,” wrote one Reddit commenter. 

Under new rules announced last week, Airbnb will generally prohibit hosts from requiring guests to wash and put away dishes, strip beds or haul garbage off-site for reservations booked on or after November 20. The changes address a long-simmering grievance among travelers, some of whom have encountered checkout instructions that read less like the end of a vacation and more like the beginning of a Saturday spent doing housework.

There are, of course, always more extreme stories, particularly if one goes looking online. “Our current host is asking us to load trash in our vehicle and drive 20 minutes to a drop-off facility,” wrote one traveler. “Our vehicle is fully packed so we’d have to make an extra trip to do this.” Another, who claimed to have already paid a $300 cleaning fee, described receiving a request for an additional $600 after checkout for allegedly failing to scrub the toilets, stove and hot tub, along with leaving “ONE ‘dirty’ pot (it was just water stains).” The guest said Airbnb ultimately sided with them.

These are individual, unverified accounts, not necessarily representative experiences. Still, one can understand why a guest might object to having a 20-minute pilgrimage to the local garbage facility added to the vacation itinerary, or why a $600 dispute over a water-stained pot might leave a lasting impression.

Some hosts maintain that basic housekeeping is simply part of staying in someone else’s home. Their critics counter that they could spend their holidays doing chores at home for free. 

Eventually, somebody delivers what is meant to be the conversation-ending argument: Then book a hotel.

Except it never quite ends the conversation. A host will point out, with some satisfaction, that a hotel room probably won’t have a full kitchen. The traveler, who was just moments ago swearing off vacation rentals forever, admits that’s exactly the problem: They need a kitchen! And there they are, host and guest, still standing in the same imaginary room, arguing about the dishes.

It’s a lot of emotional freight for four burners and a refrigerator. Which raises the obvious question: Why has the kitchen become both the most persuasive argument for renting someone’s home and the place where the whole arrangement gets so contentious?

For families, people with dietary restrictions or anyone hoping to avoid three restaurant bills a day, a kitchen can be essential. But cooking occupies a peculiar position in domestic life: necessary chore to some, passionate hobby to others, and sometimes both to the same person. I have friends who explore unfamiliar places by running through neighborhoods at sunrise or sketching what they see. I prefer wandering a local market, imagining what I might make for dinner.

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One Thanksgiving, my mom and I debated attempting a traditional holiday meal at a rental on Hilton Head Island. At home, we’re spreadsheet cooks — planning weeks, if not months, in advance — and an unfamiliar kitchen seemed a risky place to make stuffing. Then we opened the cupboards: good knives, cookware in every shape and size, multiple colanders, and a generously stocked spice cabinet guests were welcome to use. Whoever owned the house, we realized, loved to cook.

Soon, I was bicycling to Harris Teeter for cornbread ingredients, where Harry the Happy Dragon — a coin-operated green kiddie ride — stood sentry outside the entrance. Later, I padded barefoot into the yard to snip rosemary for the stuffing. I felt like Ina Garten, albeit one whose charming village market featured a mechanical reptile. We cooked leisurely. If Thanksgiving went sideways, we could always order pizza.

We’ve returned several times since. Mary, the owner, understood that a well-equipped kitchen could be part of the vacation itself.

Not every rental kitchen inspires such confidence. At a North Carolina cabin, I once envisioned mornings of cinnamon rolls, bacon and porch-side coffee, only to discover approximately three plates and no coffee maker. Salvation arrived in the form of a traveling companion who, inexplicably, had packed a French press. (I now appreciate hosts who even roughly inventory their kitchen equipment.)

That’s the peculiar promise of a vacation rental kitchen: You can experience someone else’s domestic life as your own. Their spice cabinet becomes yours; their stove, your stove; their neighborhood grocery store, your little errand. But there’s a contradiction tucked inside that promise. We want the intimacy of a home without necessarily inheriting all the obligations of maintaining one. The pleasures of playing house and the responsibilities of keeping house aren’t quite the same thing, even when they happen in the same room.

I don’t remember cleaning up after our Thanksgiving dinner, though I’m sure there was plenty of it. I remember the rosemary, the bicycle ride, the pleasure of discovering another cook’s cupboards. The rest was simply part of making dinner.

Which is perhaps why, reading through the celebrations of Airbnb’s new rules, I keep imagining the other side of that sink full of dishes. The blender caked with a week’s worth of old food. The plates slowly accumulating a geological record of every meal cooked since check-in. I wouldn’t want someone to do that to my kitchen, or to the kitchen of someone I loved.

I can already hear the response from a thousand comment sections: THEN YOU SHOULDN’T HOST!

Fair enough. I don’t! The possibility of strangers allowing marinara to fossilize on my favorite saucepan is among the many reasons I’ve never considered entering the vacation rental business.

But I do think we occasionally forget that hospitality is a two-way street. Being a good host is a genuine responsibility, as is being a good guest. And we tend to understand both roles more intuitively in situations where nobody is exchanging money. If I were watching a friend’s house while they were out of town, I wouldn’t dream of welcoming them back with a pile of bolognese-crusted pots. If that same friend handed me a list of toilets to scrub before returning the keys, however, I might reconsider the friendship.

Of course, the exchange of money changes things. When I pay a cleaning fee, I expect someone to handle the work of preparing a property for its next occupants: washing linens, scrubbing bathrooms, cleaning floors. I’m not volunteering to become somebody’s housekeeper. But I also don’t think loading the dishwasher after making dinner is an especially onerous price to pay for enjoying somebody else’s kitchen.

Now, Airbnb has attempted to draw the boundary more formally. Under its new rules, hosts may ask guests to place dirty dishes in the sink, but generally cannot require them to wash and put those dishes away.

Apparently, somewhere between setting down a dirty plate and turning on the faucet, a vacationer risks becoming a housekeeper.

And perhaps that’s the difficulty with Airbnb’s entire proposition. I loved cooking Thanksgiving in Mary’s kitchen partly because, for a few days, it felt like our own. I could wander into her garden, borrow her spices and imagine that this was simply what my life looked like on a Thursday afternoon. But the pleasure depended on a temporary arrangement, one in which somebody else’s home had been made available for my enjoyment, and in which I understood that eventually I’d have to hand it back.

What does it mean to make yourself at home somewhere when that home is also somebody else’s business? Airbnb has been asking travelers and hosts to negotiate that question for years. Judging by the delight and indignation greeting its new housekeeping rules, we still haven’t agreed on an answer.