[elbigbad]

It's hard to set up. There is instant booking on AirBnB, but mostly you have to email people and have a conversation, introduce yourself, etc. and wait for the host to get back to you. I have booked relatively last minute on AirBnB, in fact one of my best experiences was at a "startup" hotel in San Francisco, but by and large it's difficult and unreliable. Especially the "request to book" thing. If I put in a request for same day accommodations, I can't put in a second request for fear of both requests being accepted. And requests have, I believe, 24 hours to be accepted. So in theory you could try to book this morning for tonight, and not get a response until tomorrow. Or put in multiple requests and they're all accepted and you're charged for many rooms.

And even if it works, you have to coordinate with the hosts on entrance, parking, etc. at the last minute, which could be impossible.

Generally AirBnB isn't optimized for last-minute bookings in my experience.

When I need something super last minute, I can always rely on Hotel Tonight. But something like this, a last-minute AirBnB without all the AirBnB hassles, would be pretty nice.

[shalmanese]

AirBNB has needed a feature for a long time where I could send a request to multiple hosts and the first one who accepts gets the booking and the rest get simultaneously cancelled. Every time I've booked an AirBNB, there's been 3 or 4 decent places but being forced to go through them serially rather than in parallel is a major pain.

[dpflan]

It seems that last-minute requests on AirBnB do not really succeed because the hosts aren't prepared to respond in time. So, it's a psychological / cultural issue because AirBnB was created without this 'last-minute' booking concept / ability in mind (right?).

Even with this app, don't you still need to coordinate with the host for entrance, parking, etc?

Also, the fact that multiple requests for the same accommodations by the same user aren't consolidated and yield multiple chargings seems like a bug...

The hassle seem more related to what you stated, that AirBnB "isn't optimized for last-minute bookings."

[elbigbad]

Definitely sounds like you would still need to coordinate with the host, but perhaps the different culture and mindset makes people more cognizant of the fact that they have to do the coordination quickly and be ready to do it.