this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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Honestly, while Booking.com acted shittily here, I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who buys a home and does short-term rentals. Every investment vehicle has risks, and this woman copped the short end of the stick when it came to the risk associated with her investment choice. She chose to purchase a basic human need and try to maximise her profit from it at the expense of the average person trying to buy or rent a house and, if she didn’t want the risk of this happening, she should’ve chosen a less risky investment like bonds or a term deposit.
Landlords are bad; fuckwits who own short-stay rentals are far worse. The market distortion they create hurts so many people in so many ways. Frankly, I hope she takes this as a sign she should just sell the property and move on to something else.
The adage "don't hate the player, hate the game" comes to mind. Focussing on her in this situation is missing the forest for the trees. Here we have two evils fighting each other, a horrible system aimed at ultimately monopolizing the hotel market, and one woman enabled by that system. Focussing on her is like writing a little book against communism and about how much you hate Russia, during the holocaust. Like, yeah sure ok, but is now really the best time to do this, and when you look at these two sides fighting each other that's the side you focus on?
Nah, this lady sucks. Trying to cash in on short stay market while denying others a permanent place to live is a dick move. I hate the players and the game because the game they are playing hurts most of us while some snoby bitch complains about a couple of holes in a wall.
Yeah ok, sure, but again I feel like you're focussing on the wrong thing here. It's like you're watching a video of a homeless man being beaten up, see someone jaywalk in the background and go "oh my god I can't believe someone just jaywalked!". Like, yeah, sure, you're completely right, that is a bad thing to do, but I feel like there's more important things going on here, and it's really quite odd to focus on that, instead of the bigger evil here.
To be really super duper clear here: I think you're right, the lady sucks. But there is a bigger problem here, namely booking.com. And focussing on the small fries rather than the bigger picture is just kind of weird. If anything we said or did on Lemmy mattered at all I'd say you were harming the greater good of bringing down booking by focussing on one tiny little instance of a symptom of the system rather than the system itself.
Or is this a fundamental disagreement in how to solve systemic problems? I believe systemic problems can only be cured with systemic change, like regulation, going after the root cause of the problem. Some folks believe it's a matter of personal responsibility, and they believe that huge systemic problems can be solved by going after one individual at a time.
You seem to be under the impression that booking.com provides property management services. I'm not aware of them doing any such thing, but if they do them she should absolutely raise a dispute under her contract for those services. A quick scan of their information page for property owners is pretty clear, though, that it's the property owners' responsibility to get insurance if they need it (they even have some partner links for insurance providers.)
Using booking.com to advertise and resell her business does not change the fact that managing that business is entirely on her. If she doesn’t want to put in the minimum effort, or expense (e.g. insurance) required, she should get out of the business of property letting.
You can hate booking.com for many reasons, but "not running my spare property as a hotel for me so I can just sit back and count the cash" isn't really one of them.
Oooh, ok, understood. I was under the impression that folks didn't like booking here. I personally don't, for the obvious reasons (1), and so for me personally the moral calculus is easy. But if you're fully on board with booking as a company, then it makes perfect sense to write what you have.
(1) Primarily offering hotels on occupied land, but also terrible customer service, rent seeking behavior, and of course the usual platform monopoly strategy we also see with Amazon, UberEATS, etc.