Every apartment in Latin America is the same apartment

For a talk with hosts, I put together a simple exercise. I picked four short-term rentals listed in four countries, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Mexico, and placed the photos side by side. If you had to guess which one was where, you couldn't.

All four photos show the same gray sofa. The same abstract print in pastel tones. The same bed with a throw pillow that reads "All you need is love." Four countries with centuries of history, four architectures, four ways of cooking, talking and living. And in the photos, one single apartment, repeated.

The French anthropologist Marc Augé called them non-places, spaces stripped of identity, history and human ties. Airports, highways, hotel chains. Places you pass through without ever being anywhere. For years, short-term rentals were sold as the opposite. The promise was to sleep in a real home, in a real neighborhood, like someone who lives there. Today much of the supply has become exactly what it promised to avoid.

Hoteliers know this road well, though they traveled it in the opposite direction. Chains spent decades perfecting the identical room in every city in the world. In recent years, many have gone looking for exactly what they had erased. Collections of independent hotels, local design, a sense of place. Short-term rentals, born with the promise of authenticity, are arriving at the very point the hotel industry has been trying to leave.

My argument is simple. Across Latin America, many hosts hide the very thing that would make their rental unique, the culture of the place where it stands. They hide it to look modern and to avoid risk. And that fear costs them, because a rental with no identity becomes more and more dependent on price.

I understand how it happened. A host furnishing a first apartment looks at what is already listed, copies what seems to work and picks what no one will reject. Catalog furniture is also cheaper, quick to get and easy to replace. Working with a local carpenter or textile designer takes time, contacts and patience. Neutral feels safe and convenient. But neutral has a cost that few people calculate.

A rental that could be in any city competes against every similar rental in its own city. It loses its best way to stand out and ends up tied to price. And in a price war, someone is always willing to charge less. If there is one thing this work has taught me, it is that a place with character can beat a better location. I saw it firsthand. For years I rented out a private room in a neighborhood that was not on any tourist map, at a nightly rate many entire apartments would have envied. Guests chose it for what surrounded it, for how the space was designed, for everything that made it unique. They didn't want to be one more tourist. They wanted to live in the city for a while.

In Latin America, the problem has one more layer, one that is easy to miss from the United States or Europe. For a long time, we Latin Americans learned to see ourselves through outside eyes. The Global North, the United States and Europe, stands for modernity. Latin America stands for landscape, tradition, something picturesque with a backdrop of scarcity. Tourism has fed that image because it pays. A street market in Europe is sold as heritage. The same market in Lima or Buenos Aires is sold as local color, and sometimes as something marginal. The structure is the same. The gaze is what changes.

Worse, many of us in Latin America end up believing that image. We tend to judge ourselves more harshly than we judge other countries. And when it is time to furnish an apartment, we erase what is ours to look like an idea of modernity taken from a catalog. How can we sell the world something we don't value ourselves?

Identity doesn't mean dressing an apartment up as a postcard either. A poncho on the wall and a decorative mate gourd are just another version of generic. Identity lives in more concrete things. The original parquet floor someone tried to cover. A piece by an artist from the neighborhood. Textiles from a local designer. A chair made by a carpenter three blocks away. The bakery only the neighbors know about.

It also moves an economy the generic model leaves out. Every rental with identity can be a showcase for artists, artisans, textile designers, furniture makers, florists and natural cosmetics producers. The money that now goes into catalog furniture could stay in the city the guest came to discover.

The industry carries enormous responsibility here, and it is the part I most want to discuss. For years, the sector has worked to reduce guest uncertainty. Brand standards, photo guidelines, amenity checklists, criteria that push some listings above others. All of it has helped people book in a city they don't know without fear of a bad surprise. Fast wifi, a desk, accessibility and sustainability matter, a lot.

But consistency has a side effect. If the only things that get measured are the ones you can tick on a checklist, the result will be a checklist. None of those boxes tells guests where they are. And hosts who see what gets rewarded end up playing it safe. The question in front of the industry is how to make properties easy to compare without making them identical. How to give guests the confidence they want without erasing the place they came to discover. Whoever solves that, whether hotel groups, platforms, operators or the companies building tools for this sector, will hold something that is scarce today. Places that can't be copied from a catalog.

So I suggest every host try the same test I did. Look at the photos of your rental and cover the name of the city. If no one can guess where you are, your competition is every apartment just like yours.

And there is always one that's cheaper.