By Tiger Thomas
WICKER PARK — Should I offer my guests breakfast? Will they be able open a lockbox? Do they expect me to provide shampoo?
As an Airbnb host in Chicago, I ask myself a lot of questions.
Due to summertime finally arriving, I more often ask, “Where am I going to sleep tonight?”
We can list our spare room, or our entire home.
My “cozy Wicker Park room,” as I have the spare listed, can earn $129 per night, before federal, state, city taxes, the newly added 4.5-percent lodging and hospitality tax, and Airbnb service fees.
So each night, I can realistically earn about $80 while living alongside my new guests.
However, if I book my entire two-bedroom, two-bathroom loft, I can earn upwards of $400 nightly. I may have twice as much cleaning and laundry to do after the guests depart, but I can quadruple my earnings.
While booking the entire loft seems logical and financially advantageous, the true problem is that I am now displaced from my own home.
Therein lies the question everyone wants to know: Where do Airbnb hosts sleep when guests book their home?
We hosts are hustlers. To make a few hundred bucks, we will stay with friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, or family.
Some of us will even rent another cheaper, Airbnb accommodation and try to stay in our own neighborhood, so as to interrupt our lives as little as possible.
If I am able to stay local, I can still go to my coffee shop, my yoga studio and see my friends easily.
I have a friend and fellow host that leased another entire apartment so he is sure to have a bed of his own in which to sleep.
When hosts talk, we share best practices, but mostly, we are trying to find new ideas for lodging. This is our hustle.
Airbnb has put value on space that we once provided for free.
While free couchsurfing was once the popular and cheap way to travel, there were too many variables and not enough privacy.
Airbnb has turned all of us with a spare room into entrepreneurs, just as Uber did for car owners.
Airbnb has shown us the value of our space and forces us to sometimes put money before friendship.
When friends visit, I find myself thinking of the lost profit. I now tell my friends they can stay with me Monday through Thursday. Weekends are my surge pricing.
While we may sleep around (figuratively), we do in fact enjoy sharing our spaces and information with travellers.
We give recommendations, directions, and insight while providing a warm welcome into our homes and kindly requesting guests respect our homes and love our cities as much as we do.
Airbnb hosts create their own community. We meet by chance, on the site, or through friends.
We are drawn to each other and enjoy meeting other individuals that follow this same strange business model and lifestyle.
We laugh as we exchange stories of unfortunate plumbing accidents or eccentric guests. Inevitably, the apex question between two hosts is always, “Where do you stay when your home is booked?”
I routinely hear responses of vacations, road trips, bus trips or even camping.
A young male Chicago host told me that he stayed out drinking all night and slept on a bench for a few hours in Wicker Park until he was able to walk home and check out his guests.
Last summer during a trip to Europe, I asked my female Parisian Airbnb host where she would stay as I had just booked her entire apartment near the Louvre.
She looked me right in the eye and without blushing, replied, “With my lover.”
In sum, we can sleep anywhere, except our own home.
