Airbnb hosts just found out they’re in the hospitality business, and they hate it — a lot of owners and salespeople are making the same mistake
For owners, presidents, and CEOs who think they know what business they’re in. You might be surprised who your customer thinks you’re competing with.
You don’t get to decide what business you’re in. Your customer decides, by what they compare you to — and if you’ve misjudged that comparison, you’re loading work and friction onto them that they’ve already stopped tolerating everywhere else. That’s the whole story of the Airbnb mess playing out right now, and it’s the same mistake I watch business owners and salespeople make every week, usually without knowing it.
Here’s what happened at Airbnb, in case you missed it. Starting November 20, the company is barring hosts from requiring guests to do the heavy checkout chores — stripping beds, washing and putting away dishes, running laundry, hauling trash offsite. Hosts can still charge a cleaning fee, and they can still ask you to drop your dishes in the sink and lock the door on the way out. But the long chore list, the one you’d find taped to the fridge after you’d already paid a two-hundred-dollar cleaning fee, is done.
The guests cheered, but the hosts revolted. One called Airbnb “an abusive partner” on the company forum. And somewhere in the middle of it, I read the sharpest observation in the whole fight: Airbnb owners are suddenly discovering they’re in the hospitality industry, and they don’t like it.
That’s exactly right, and it’s a thought worth stealing for your own business.
Who decides what business you’re in?
The typical Airbnb owner thinks they’re in the real estate business, or the passive-income business. Buy a property, list it, collect checks while it mostly runs itself. TikTok is full of videos about that. Under that theory, a chore list is perfectly reasonable — you’re renting them a space, and renters clean up after themselves.
Trouble is, the guest never agreed to that theory. The guest is comparing the stay to the last hotel they booked, because that’s the actual alternative. And when I check into a Hilton, I don’t wonder what the chore list is going to be. There isn’t one. I don’t strip the bed, I don’t run a load of towels, I don’t take the trash to a dumpster down the street. I pay, I sleep, I leave. So when a guest pays a hotel-sized rate plus a cleaning fee and then gets handed a list of jobs the cleaner is supposedly being paid to do, it doesn’t feel like renting an apartment. It feels like getting ripped off, because they’re measuring it against what it’s actually competing with.
The owner thought they were in real estate. The customer knew they were in hospitality the whole time. The customer was right, because the customer always decides what business you’re in. They decide it by what they put you up against, and you don’t get a vote. The customers vote with their wallets.
I’ve stayed in Airbnbs, including a four-and-a-half-month stretch as a temporary residence years ago, and I’ve had genuinely good experiences. But I’ve also shown up, paid a steep rate, paid the cleaning fee, and then found the list — wash every dish, strip and launder the sheets and remake the bed, fold the towels. None of it was disclosed before I booked, which is something Airbnb just fixed. I get exactly why guests are done with it. And a lot of us, myself included, have started defaulting back to hotels.
The same mistake, in your business
Now bring it home, because this isn’t an article about short-term rentals. It’s about you.
A lot of business owners don’t actually know what business they’re in, and a lot of salespeople don’t know what they’re actually selling. They think they’re in the product business. They sell copiers, so they think they’re in the copier business. They sell uniforms, so they think they’re in the uniform business. They sell the machine, the software, the parts, their stuff.
They’re not. They’re in the business of solving a customer’s problem, and the customer is comparing the whole experience of dealing with them to every other way that problem could get solved — including ways that didn’t exist a few years ago. Just like the Airbnb guest measuring against Hilton, your buyer is measuring the experience of buying from you against the frictionless, self-serve, no-nonsense way they now buy almost everything else. And a lot of sellers are failing that comparison the exact same way the hosts did: by offloading their own work onto the customer while still charging full price.
Here’s what offloading looks like in sales. It’s the buyer who has to chase you for a price you won’t put in writing, or the one who sits through a meeting that turns out to be a pitch rather than anything useful to him, or the one who has to explain his own business to a rep who didn’t bother to learn it before showing up. It could be the one made to do the research, assemble the information, and basically sell himself, because the salesperson treated the hard parts of the job as the customer’s problem. That’s another version of a chore list taped to the fridge. The buyer is paying full freight and doing work he can see you should have done, and he’s comparing you, unfavorably, to every vendor and every channel that doesn’t make him do it.
The host charged a cleaning fee and made the guest clean. The salesperson charges full margin and makes the buyer do the selling. It’s the same move based on the same misunderstanding about what business they’re actually in. And it results in the same growing population of customers who’ve decided they’re not putting up with it anymore.
Why the platform — or the market — eventually forces it
The Airbnb hosts didn’t change on their own. They defended the chore list right up until the platform took the choice away, because guests were drifting and Airbnb wasn’t going to let its hosts’ bad habits sink the whole business. For that matter, many are still defending it and talking about ways to circumvent the rule.
This isn’t a hunch on Airbnb’s part. In its own Q2 2026 shareholder letter, the company reported that hotel nights booked on its platform grew roughly three times as fast as its home-rental business — the guests are voting for the hotel experience inside Airbnb’s own app. Meanwhile, independent analysis of more than 600,000 U.S. listings found that existing hosts lost about 13% of their winter bookings early in the year, even as Airbnb’s overall numbers kept climbing. The platform is growing; a lot of individual hosts are shrinking. That gap is what forced Airbnb’s hand.
Your market has the same pressure building, and it doesn’t need Airbnb to enforce it. It has competitors. Somewhere in your space, somebody is figuring out how to take the chores off the customer’s plate — to be transparent on price, to show up already understanding the buyer’s business, to make the whole thing easy. When they do, every customer who’s been quietly tolerating your chore list has somewhere better to go, and they’ll go there without telling you why. You’ll just notice the bookings slowing down.
So the question the Airbnb mess should put in front of every owner is simple, and it’s not comfortable. What business do my customers think I’m in? Not what business is on my sign — what are they actually comparing me to when they decide whether I’m worth it? Because that comparison is the standard you’re being held to whether you’ve accepted it or not, and if there’s a chore list anywhere in your customer’s experience, somebody is about to take it away. Better it’s you than a competitor, and far better you than the market deciding you weren’t in the business you thought you were.
If you want a straight read on where your sales process is quietly handing work to your customers that they’ve stopped tolerating, that’s a good chunk of what The Navigator’s Sales Diagnostic is built to surface.
And if you buy for your company or lead one, you can help sharpen the research behind pieces like this. The Navigator Buyer Study is ongoing, takes only a few minutes, and everyone who participates gets the full findings when the report publishes in January 2027. Add your voice to the Navigator Buyer Study here.
Troy Harrison is The Sales Navigator. He works with owners, presidents, and CEOs of small and midsize B2B companies who want sales organizations that produce consistent results, rather than ones that depend on having the right individuals in the seats. He has run The Sales Navigator, his consulting and training practice, for 22 years, working with hundreds of B2B companies in 23 countries. He is the author of Sell Like You Mean It!, and The Pocket Sales Manager. Reach him at 913-645-3603 or troy@troyharrison.com, or visit TroyHarrison.com.
FAQ
What does “the customer decides what business you’re in” actually mean?
It means your customer judges you against whatever they see as the real alternative, not against your own category. An Airbnb guest measures the stay against a hotel, so a chore list feels outrageous. Your buyer measures the experience of working with you against the easiest way they could solve the same problem — and that comparison, not your self-definition, sets the standard you’re held to.
How do I figure out what my customers are really comparing me to?
Ask them, directly, what their alternatives were and what nearly made them choose someone else — and listen for the ones outside your category. The answers are usually broader than owners expect, because buyers compare the whole experience, not just the product. Once you know the real comparison set, you can see where you’re falling short of it.
What’s the sales equivalent of Airbnb’s “chore list”?
Any point where you make the customer do work you should have done while still charging full price. Hiding your pricing so they have to chase it, running meetings that are pitches instead of help, showing up without understanding their business, making them assemble their own information. Each one is a chore taped to the fridge, and buyers increasingly refuse to do them.
My business really is different from a hotel, or from my competitors. Doesn’t that matter?
It matters to you; it may not matter to the customer. You can be genuinely different and still lose, if the difference isn’t one the buyer values or can verify before committing. The Airbnb hosts were right that their places weren’t hotels — and it didn’t save them, because guests were comparing the parts that overlapped. Know which of your differences the customer actually cares about, and don’t assume the rest will carry you.
If the market will eventually force this anyway, why not wait?
Because the ones who move first capture the customers the laggards are about to lose, and they do it without a platform or a downturn forcing their hand. Waiting means you change under duress, after you’ve already shed the customers who quietly left for someone easier to deal with. Doing it on purpose, now, is cheaper and it’s a competitive advantage. Doing it late is just damage control.
