The "Death" of Authentic Hosting?

Steven Boykey Sidley's recent piece about the hollowing out of Airbnb resonated with me, because most of it is true. The junk fees. The QR codes and WhatsApp strangers. The investor-owned units that look like every other investor-owned unit. The slow disappearance of the personal touch that made the original promise of Airbnb so compelling.

He's right that something has been lost in the industrialisation of short-term rental. But I'd push back on one thing: the problem isn't property management companies. The problem is property management companies that have stopped caring about the guest.

I run AirCnC, a short-term rental management company on the South Peninsula of Cape Town. I manage 16 properties. I am also the person who leaves a congratulations on your anniversary gift basket (because you mentioned it when you booked), or to ask whether your baby needs a cot, or to let you know the best spot to watch the sunset from the property you've just booked. You have my number. Not a call centre. Not a chatbot. Mine.

The model Sidley mourns, the host who hands you a key and recommends a restaurant, doesn't have to die just because a professional is involved. It requires deliberate choice to keep it alive. It requires a manager who still reads the guest notes, who notices that someone mentioned it's their first trip to Cape Town, who knows each property well enough to give advice that actually means you get the best experience.

What industrialised hosting has killed is attentiveness. The economics of running 200 listings on autopilot don't allow for it. But the economics of running 20 listings with genuine care absolutely do, and that's a business model too.

Now, to the harder question: why are there so many investors in short-term rentals in the first place?

Sidley points to the economics, and he's right that they're compelling. But in South Africa, there are two specific forces (in my opinion) driving investors toward short-term rental that rarely make it into these conversations, and neither of them is straightforward greed.

The first is the PIE Act. The Prevention of Illegal Eviction Act was designed to protect vulnerable people from unlawful eviction, and that intention is legitimate. But in practice, it has created a situation where a non-paying long-term tenant can remain in a property for 6 to 12 months, sometimes longer depending on court backlogs, with the landlord carrying the full cost and almost no recourse. Any investor doing proper due diligence on a residential property in South Africa will encounter this reality quickly, and many will reach the same conclusion: long-term letting is simply not a viable option.

The second is currency advantage. Foreign buyers, particularly from Europe, can purchase a Cape Town property at a fraction of what an equivalent would cost them at home. A beachfront apartment that represents a modest outlay in pounds or euros represents serious capital in rands. That same currency gap makes short-term rental an attractive yield play, because guests paying in foreign currency generate returns that are genuinely hard to match elsewhere.

It is worth acknowledging that this dynamic does contribute to property price inflation that puts ownership further out of reach for locals, and that frustration is legitimate. But the solution to that problem is exchange control policy and foreign ownership regulation, not a ban on the platform those buyers happen to use.

Investors are not villains. They are people managing risk in a market that has handed them very specific incentives. Short-term rental isn't a calculated attack on housing stock. For a lot of property owners, it is the only model that makes financial sense.

The frustration of locals priced out of their neighbourhoods is real and valid. But banning Airbnb doesn't fix the PIE Act. It doesn't close the currency gap. It removes the symptom while leaving every cause completely intact. If governments, including our own, want to return investment properties to the long-term rental market, the more honest conversation is about tenant and landlord rights, court capacity, foreign ownership frameworks, and what it actually takes to make residential letting a safe bet for a private investor. That is a harder conversation than pointing at a platform.

Airbnb has its problems. The fee structures, the race to the bottom on quality, the loss of the human element, all of that is fair criticism. But it is a symptom of deeper failures: regulatory environments that push investors toward short-term models, and a platform that scaled so fast it forgot what made it worth using in the first place.

Some of us haven't forgotten. Travellers do have another option: look past the listing and find the human behind it. Check whether the reviews mention a person by name. Ask who actually picks up the phone at 11pm when the geyser fails. If there's a real answer, you've found one of the good ones.

Laurette Gliddon is the founder of AirCnC Property Management, a full-service short-term rental company covering the South Peninsula of Cape Town.