Why Airbnb is dead to me

Have you ever travelled to a foreign country where you don't speak the language?

You really need to put yourself in the tourist's shoes. If I booked a tour and the host drove me to a different place to stay, that's all I can do. You rely on their ability to communicate, and if they're being kind and doing their best to make your stay comfortable, then that's fantastic.

What you're suggesting is that you're going to start making international calls with some website's support staff while you have luggage on the street, no place to stay, in a foreign city and completely on your own. You're also going to blow off the only person (the host) who cares at all about your situation. Are you kidding me?

Customer service is a joke. I posted this on HN about a year ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005200

They turned me from being an advocate for their service to never wanting to use their service again. I travel frequently with kids, we use alternatives now.

This is a fundamental problem with online markets of any kind. There was a period in the early 2000's when "eBay SUCKS" type websites would surface regularly from angry users.

But then, as now, you see both kinds of story. Ones like this one, where the seller / renter was anywhere from an outright fraud to unscrupulous, but also the other way - stories of buyers who "returned" goods and got refunds, only for the returned item turning out to be fake / faulty / nonexistent. I'm sure AirBnB have equally large problems with people who have an uneventful stay, leave and immediately lodge a complaint against the host.

It sounds like AirBnB could probably be nicer about this, but equally the author of this post did violate their terms of service (which aren't unreasonable - letting people book for other people opens the door to agents and unscrupulous 3rd parties who charge a fee without adding value).

It would be interesting to see the perspective of AirBnB support. I wonder how many possibly fraudulent refund claims they deal with on a daily basis?

Just tonight, my mother checked into an Airbnb in Vienna, Austria. She sent me photos of the bed which did not have new sheets, the towels which were not fresh, a band aid on the floor and some rubbish bins full of cigarettes and ash. The apartment was overall pretty dirty. The host's contact phone number goes straight to message bank (I also tried many times) and the host is not answering emails.

In this situation, what do you do?

She's travelling alone and in her 50s and as you can imagine, she's pretty upset. I decided to get her a hotel and called her an Uber. I then called Airbnb and they said they will attempt to contact the host and they will get back to us.

She wouldn't know what to do without me and if I weren't available, she'd probably end up wandering the streets at night looking for a hotel because she'd be too upset to return to the Airbnb place.

I think for now, I will stop recommending Airbnb.

> It seems like it would be a nightmare to sort through a he-said she-said after the fact when the offended party didn't even book a stay (instead the room was booked by some other person that is insisting "no, it's cool, I know them"), and furthermore didn't even report the apartment not being available when the issue occurred.

It's AirBnB's job to do this, sort out these kinds of situations. It's not that hard to come up with a 'nuclear option' to exercise in these situations, where the customer can get a resolution and the host gets a sharp enough slap on the wrist to where it's unprofitable to build a business out of bilking people on AirBnB's platform.

Seems to me that there might be a bit of a leadership vacuum at the company, running AirBnB in as many countries as they're running it in, I imagine not all of the outfits are going to be fully competent. If not even Twitter escalation is solving the problem though, maybe its the executives sleeping at the wheel.