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How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

chriskiehl.com

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Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#81

Post by sva_ »

Nextgrid wrote: post #32
trhr wrote: post #9

I had the same thing happen to me. Not only do I not stay at AirBNBs anymore, I cancelled my Discover Card when they refused to fix it... after ~15 years as a customer. Once you hit a certain tax bracket and your purchases tend to be of a certain value, you start getting a more skilled person trying to fuck you, and they often win. At this income bracket, it's time to get an AmEx (or another card with really good pay…

Outright trashing the place is obvious and will backfire, but there are plenty of subtle ways to generate significant inconvenience and expenses in a plausibly-deniable manner that will only take effect weeks or even months after the fact. Hint: perishable goods and unaccessible (maintenance?) areas in the property. Pests would also work.

'Forget' a nice swiss cheese behind the heater.

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#83

Post by Nextgrid »

berkle4455 wrote: post #55

They said "kindly". Claire isn't a real person, that was a an intentional scam.

Yep, sounds like third-world boiler room and will explain the determination to make a quick buck and screw the customer despite an honest mistake.

Chances are, the listing itself is a complete scam and there would’ve been something else gone wrong if the booking proceeded, but the author being honest about the third-party booking gave them an easy way out to begin with.

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#84

Post by Meph504 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #32
trhr wrote: post #9

I had the same thing happen to me. Not only do I not stay at AirBNBs anymore, I cancelled my Discover Card when they refused to fix it... after ~15 years as a customer. Once you hit a certain tax bracket and your purchases tend to be of a certain value, you start getting a more skilled person trying to fuck you, and they often win. At this income bracket, it's time to get an AmEx (or another card with really good pay…

Outright trashing the place is obvious and will backfire, but there are plenty of subtle ways to generate significant inconvenience and expenses in a plausibly-deniable manner that will only take effect weeks or even months after the fact. Hint: perishable goods and unaccessible (maintenance?) areas in the property. Pests would also work.

Many states have laws that are specific extra penalties for this sort of malicious behavior. Not only could it cost you the cost of undoing any damage you've done, but criminal charges on top of it. probably not the best advice to be giving to people.

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#85

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

This is a scam. We were almost a victim of something similar, but through Expedia. The scam is to induce you to cancel so they can extract a fee.

Basically the listing was nonsense, but we didn't notice it immediately. In our case the flat in Paris was both in the 2nd and 14th androssiment, somehow. It was listed in the 2nd but elsewhere it says 14th.

Of course we went to cancel but there was a 30% fee. We explained it to Expedia customer service and of course they're useless and said the fee was legit and didn't understand the scam.

We took it up with our bank (Chase) who took months to resolve it, we basically kept on getting passed up the chain of people who examine the claims, until we got to a high enough level that they actually understood the scam (after a hour explaining it several times). We were fully refunded our ~$500.

Of course we never will use Expedia again. We generally stick to booking.com because they seem to side with the customer most consistently. Free cancellation, or pay at the hotel is a must. One of the main reasons to avoid AirBnB is that they will keep your money in most cases.

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#86

Post by twelve40 »

che_shirecat wrote: post #45
Nextgrid wrote: post #6

Charge it back via your bank and explain the situation. Worst case scenario, it gets denied, you don't lose anything either way. The initial misunderstanding was cleared up just one hour after the booking - it should be very reasonable for the host to offer a full refund, it's not like it was a last-minute cancellation where the host would struggle to get it rebooked in time and lose out. The host is clearly being ma…

Getting yourself banned off of Airbnb for $950 doesn't sound optimal unless you are swearing off short term lodging around the world (outside of hotels) for the foreseeable future. That's one of the negative externalities of capture-the-market VC investing - getting banned on one of these platforms cuts you off from almost the entirety of supply because of how marketplace dynamics work.

it was the case when they were the hot new disruptor. By now there are alternatives for house/apartment rentals, so they can't dick around and rip people off like that anymore. They've been called out on "cleaning fees", at some point may be forced to implement a sane cancelation window as well.

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#87

Post by zeroonetwothree »

ralph84 wrote: post #78
trhr wrote: post #9

I had the same thing happen to me. Not only do I not stay at AirBNBs anymore, I cancelled my Discover Card when they refused to fix it... after ~15 years as a customer. Once you hit a certain tax bracket and your purchases tend to be of a certain value, you start getting a more skilled person trying to fuck you, and they often win. At this income bracket, it's time to get an AmEx (or another card with really good pay…

Meh, Amex denied my chargeback when StubHub was illegally refusing refunds for events canceled due to covid. I don’t think there is any card out there that hasn’t gotten much tougher on chargebacks recently due to both the covid shitshow and the massive increase in chargeback fraud.

I had no issues charging back thousands because of covid cancellations

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#88

Post by franciscop »

rjh29 wrote: post #30

This is the reason I hope booking.com are successful (they increasingly have aparthotel listings). They usually offer free cancellation and I've never had a problem cancelling for free if I had a good reason (such as illness). Other thing to watch out for is fees. The place I'm staying at charges 20000yen ($150) if you enter the apartment without taking off your shoes, 6000yen ($44) per hour overstayed after checkout…

They definitely cannot enforce those. Now if you do enter with shoes AND damage the floor a bit*, I still doubt they could even enforce those. Even courts here are not punitive in nature (they are restorative), so even if they sued you and won for going in with shoes, which I highly doubt, at most you'd have to pay for the damage they can prove that you made, which would be few thousand yens.

The only one I am a bit unsure is about guests, since they might technically be able to limit who goes around.

*if you do go with dirty shoes and make a mess is a different matter, I'm just talking about normal walking with shoes

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#89

Post by luckylion »

eli wrote: post #68
nixpulvis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being banned from Best Western, for example, because you disputed a charge! Having a dispute, especially one which is so reasonable like this, being grounds for banning is insane to me. Companies as large as Airbnb cannot be just banning whoever they want. This whole notion of, we don't agree with you, so we'll just ban you thing has got to stop.

Uh yeah that absolutely can happen. Car rental companies are known to ban people who do chargebacks. If you refuse to pay a business what they think you owe then there’s a decent chance they won’t want future business from you.

Isn't the charge-back lower stakes than actually suing them? Because that would be the only alternative left, the charge-back is the third-party arbitration.

Re: How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb

#90

Post by Nextgrid »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #75
bboygravity wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by the banning comments. Can't you just create a new account with a new payment method and different email address? Maybe I still have too much of that 90's internet mentality, dunno.

It should be trivial to ban a certain billing address, plus a lot of companies require SMS 2FA now, and most people do not have multiple phone numbers to burn. Besides that, I think AirBnb might require you to upload government issued photo identification too, but I am not sure.

They use heuristics, but yes in general you can work around them if you're persistent enough.
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