We’ve had to move out of our house while bathroom repair/remodel goes on from the catastrophic leak. Currently in an all suite hotel. I saw an AirB house at a good price in a decent neighborhood and booked. We went to see it and A) the area description was horribly misrepresented and B) the house is not in good shape. Unattended lawn, crap in carport & a hole in the wall in carport. We didn’t enter.
Less than 24 hrs. after I booked, I tried to cancel. Nope. They will keep my 2K since I was cancelling less than 7 days before wanting it. I made the reservation 6 days before needing it. I have appealed under the conditions I stated above & they are looking into it. I will appeal through my credit card but Don’t have much hope.
So I have never used AirB before & won’t ever again, but can anyone offer any help?
Did you take pictures? Maybe that would help your case. Good Luck. I’d be so irritated.
We sent the photos we got. They were blowing me off until I said I had pics. They did say they would escalate my case.
I’ve never used Airbnb or VRBO, and stories like this don’t make me inclined to do so.
I travel a lot, but always book hotels or inns, and those only after thoroughly reading online reviews.
Hopefully you get compensated for your loss, OP.
In what way was the area description misrepresented? I worry that this is hard to document, unless there’s something major and specific that you can show, like a large noisy factory nearby in what was represented to be a residential area. So perhaps best to just focus on documenting the property itself. But again, I do worry about how clearly it’s possible to show this just from external photographs. Were there external photographs on the Air B&B site for comparison?
But if you can document unequivocally that the vendor did not provide what you paid for, you should have no problem getting a refund through your credit card company.
I’ve done a lot of AirBnBs and have never had a truly bad one. Did this one have reviews? Always good to look at them, I’d worry about being the first to stay.
I’m a bit confused though. Was the lawn a jungle? Was the hole in the carport in a wall connected to the house? Was the neighborhood dangerous? If it was close to where you live, I’d think you’d know what the area was like.
One we rented in LA was clearly owned by a student from UCLA. He had a lot of his stuff there, which was fine for us. These aren’t hotels.
Glad you took pictures, though.
If you want to document that the house was not up to scratch, what you really want is photos from inside the house. Is it too late to get some?
Your other problem is if it turns out your standards are higher than the person assessing your case. Like, if I had to find an emergency house because my own house was flooded, my priorities would be heat/air, comfy beds, room for the stuff I need to bring, doors all lock properly. Nothing about the carport or the lawn would really register!
You couldn’t be bothered to read the cancellation policy before booking? Or the reviews? Or go see it? Sorry, the situation sucks that the listing was misleading, but a tiny bit of diligence on your part would have saved you a ton of hassle.
A lot of people would do well to read this Vice article about Air B&B scams and the company’s…less than stellar response.
I’ve found renting private homes and online dating to have a lot of similarities, a big one of which is: everyone is at least a little bit full of shit.
Thanks, this is great - do you have any insight into whether I should have bought Amazon stock in 1997?
My daughter rented an Airbnb place for seven nights. Before the cancellation date she modified her stay to two nights. The rental owner said she wouldn’t receive a refund because it was high season. Which didn’t make sense because high season would mean it would be easier to re-rent the place. Because she was modifying instead of cancelling the refund didn’t apply.
She appealed to the Airbnb folks, saying that had she known that she would have cancelled instead of modifying. They told the rental owner she could have the two nights or none. The owner took the two nights and my daughter received the refund.
Airbnb responded quickly with the arbitration. And my daughter had no complaints. It should be noted that the judges aren’t impartial. They will protect the renter, as without them there would be no Airbnb.
On this narrow point, I don’t agree. It’s normal practice for hotel/rental cancellation policy to be more restrictive in high season, because the renter is 100% certain of renting the place given enough time to do so. So if a last minute cancellation turns out to be too late to find another renter, it’s a loss of certain revenue.
No, but maybe you can whine about it to Ameritrade or The Wall Street Journal, or whomever didn’t tell you to buy back then.
Hey, I get the OP’s frustration with the listing not meeting their expectations and hope they get a refund, but blaming AirB&B, who seems to be helping with the appeal, is off base, especially when the OP could have easily avoided the whole fiasco.
Don’t see how this is relevant as the OP describes the renter was apparently knowingly misrepresenting the property.
The OP does not mention the reviews. They may have been non-existant, or a relative who agreed to stay for . good review, or reviews from when the place is nice. then again it may be that the reviews indicated it’s a shithole. We simply don’t know.
They did exactly that, which is why they wanted to cancel it. But who the flying fuck checks out a new to them air bnb or hotel for that matter in person before the book it in advance? Usually if something looks good, decent, and what they need they will book it.
Sorry your reasoning on this and your conclusion does not seem realistic.
As it turned out, in this true life experience, my daughter decided to stay another night. But. it was already booked. Why? Because it was high season.
Did you talk to the hosts? Or just ABB? When we hosted, we appreciated the strict refund schedule, but made exceptions for most circumstances. If you aren’t staying, we don’t really need your money. And it isn’t like you reserved it months in advance, blocking paying guests, and then just blew us off the day before. Sounds like the electrons were barely dry on your reservation before you reconsidered.
That said, I have more experience as a host than a guest, is the refund policy that difficult to find when reserving a room? I know I always ask the hotel clerk what the cancellation policy is when I book a hotel, even if they’re almost always the same.
In a “booked at day-7, cancelled at day-6” situation, I’d normally think a 90% refund was reasonable. After all, you might have blocked out someone else during that one day.
Keeping the whole caboodle, under those circumstances, does sound excessive.
Nevertheless, it’s universally true that cancellation policies are more restrictive in high season, for the reason I gave. A “fair” policy is not be just influenced by the probability of re-rental in the window after cancellation. Sure, that probability is higher in high season. It must also factor in the probability that the property would have been rented to someone else in the longer window during which the property was shown as unavailable subsequent to the cancelling renter’s original booking. That’s also higher in high season.
I worked briefly in hotel and car rental reservations and there are all sorts of systems to ensure they make maximum profits. For Air BNB, it’s still a niche market. Very few large companies are going to use air BNB for their business travel and I doubt (though will not swear to it) that it’s probably not popular among the 55 and over demographic. So, getting an immediate rerental for Air BNB or a resort is far less likely than a big city hotel.