I have to take issue with your assertion about hotel staff being unionized (although I recognize that could be true for your region). I’ve worked in hotels before and the reason they stay “cheap” is because they pay the cleaning and non-customer-facing staff the absolute bare minimum.
I’m coming from Midwestern America which certainly colors this experience, but in my case the housekeeping staff was made up almost exclusively of non-native English speakers. They were paid minimum, or close to it, and had room quotas that left them with 15-20 to “clean” a room.
On the events side of the business, the guys who set up tables and chairs were almost exclusively young, poor black men. The hotel only ran the air conditioning in those ballrooms when guests were present so it was regularly 80-85 f in those rooms with minimum wage staff doing manual labor.
Please understand I don’t have any love for the investment vehicle model that has taken over air-bnb, but hotels are by far the most disgusting socioeconomic workplace I’ve been in. I really don’t have the money for air-bnb, but I’ll certainly take some person paying off their rental over large corporation exploiting unskilled workers and immigrants.
First of all, fuck hotels, period.
And well, bad news… here in Mexico city the airbnb industry (yeah, u read it right) comes from conglomerates or already stupidly rich people, so yeah.
Also I work in a hostal in this same city, and yeah the pay is horrible, but keeps me floating while I get something else and there’s a lot of really nice people running the place wich their income really depends on guests making reservations, maybe one or two tips, etc. So yeah, the pay its horrible but it makes jobs.
My recommendation? Get a room in a hostal like the one I work for, usually they r really run by people, that’s one of the reasons I’m still working in there.
