The small discomfort of saying "I run an Airbnb"
In Japan, when we introduce ourselves as minpaku (vacation rental) operators, what most people picture is a budget hotel squeezed into a house: beds packed in wall to wall, a smart lock on the door, a stay where you never meet a single person. To be fair, many vacation rentals in Japan are built exactly that way, and plenty of them work perfectly well as businesses.
But we have always felt a quiet gap between that image and the word "Airbnb." This article is about that gap.
What the word "minpaku" came to carry in Japan
The Japanese word minpaku is inseparable from regulatory history. Around the time the Private Lodging Business Act (the "minpaku law") came into force in 2018, the word spread as a catch-all for "businesses that convert homes into lodging."
Because it was born as a regulatory term, there is no philosophy in it. Licensed guesthouses, special-zone rentals, minpaku-law rentals — the media bundled them all together as "minpaku." The result was a settled image: a discount version of a hotel, housed in a residential building. Cheaper than a hotel, but with lesser facilities and service — a word placed firmly inside that hierarchy.
We are not here to attack that image. The problem is what happens when you design an operation on that premise: you end up building a shrunken copy of a hotel. Fight on a hotel's home ground and you will be compared on price, facilities, and location. An ordinary house has very few ways to beat a building purpose-built for lodging.
What Airbnb was originally about
Airbnb, on the other hand, was never born as a hotel substitute. It began in 2007, when every hotel in San Francisco sold out during a design conference and the founders put air mattresses in their living room for stranded travelers. Air Bed and Breakfast — literally, sharing a slice of your own life with a traveler.
The value was never just "a cheaper place to sleep." You stay in a local's home, see the city through their eyes, and touch a daily life no guidebook covers. Host and guest are connected in a way that is different from facility and customer. The original texture of the phrase "sharing economy" was right there.
Airbnb's review culture and host evaluation system are still built on that philosophy. "Communication" and "Check-in" sit alongside "Cleanliness" as independent rating categories precisely because the platform evaluates the whole experience, not just the room.
The fork in the road: "a hotel inside a house" vs. "a life that is shared"
Put simply, two very different models live inside the single word "minpaku."
One is the model that turns a home into lodging as efficiently as possible. Maximize the number of beds, remove staff from operations, and build out manuals and signage so that guest interaction is reduced to nearly zero. Polish that efficiency and win occupancy through per-person price competitiveness. This business runs on the grammar of the hotel industry.
The other is the model that shares a way of living. Guests stay as if they lived in the neighborhood, and the value you deliver is the perspective of someone genuinely rooted in that area and that house — and the communication that grows out of it. This business runs on the grammar of Airbnb.
Neither is right or wrong. In our property management business we take care of properties run on the former model, and depending on location and property type, it can absolutely be the rational choice.
But if you design an operation while confusing the two, it fails. Put Airbnb-grammar pricing on a hotel-grammar room and it looks overpriced; do the reverse and you are underselling. Guest communication, and what reviews reward, are completely different between the two models. Which grammar does your property run on? Deciding this is the true starting point of every operational decision.
Why we choose the Airbnb-like Airbnb
Our own directly operated properties run on the latter grammar. The reason is simple: as travelers ourselves, that is the kind of place we want to stay in.
We have stayed in Airbnbs all over the world as guests. What stayed in our memory was never the luxurious facilities, the exhaustive multilingual manuals, the 24/7 instant replies in English, or the flawlessly spotless, perfectly ordered rooms. It was the fittings that let us settle in and live; the restaurant no guidebook listed that a host told us about; the host who went out of their way to help when a delayed flight wrecked our plans. Things like that. We believe our Guest Favorite badges and reviews in the high 4.9s are the result of trying to recreate those experiences in our own properties.
In closing — including the times we are seen as an "overpriced minpaku"
Let us be honest here. In Japan, the sharing economy and stay-style travel are still not widely understood, and we suspect that is the root of the whole confusion.
So when someone books our property expecting a hotel, or a "cheap minpaku," and finishes their stay with only the minimum necessary messages, our property may well feel overpriced to them. That is not their fault. It means the value we want to deliver has not fully reached them yet.
We are a couple who love Airbnb and love stay-style travel. That is exactly why we keep writing about this difference — to slowly widen the choices Japanese travel can offer.
And one more thing we can say with confidence, as operators: communication is simply more fun in Airbnb's grammar.
Treat guest correspondence as "customer support" and every inquiry becomes a chore — something to close as fast as possible while optimizing your response-time KPIs. But the moment the same exchange becomes "a host helping a guest with their journey," it turns into genuine enjoyment and fulfillment. A message saying they went to the restaurant you recommended. A question about their itinerary. A goodbye on checkout morning. This is not workload; it is being invited into a small part of someone's trip.
That feeling is something we hope you will experience as a host yourself.
"Minpaku" and Airbnb are not the same thing. Just keeping that distinction in mind changes how pricing, interiors, and guest communication all look. Next time, we bring this lens to platform choice: Airbnb, international OTAs, and Japanese OTAs — how their guests and grammars differ.