I continue to use AirBnb but have been pretty disappointed in their customer service. I rent out a family cabin occasionally and someone who stayed there scratched the floor accidentally wearing winter boots with spikes on them. They admitted this, apologized and were generally totally awesome about it.<p>It took me <i></i>months<i></i> to get Airbnb to figure out how to deduct money from their damage deposit. They first said I had to call the police and get a police report, which I refused to do -- call the police on these nice tenants who already explained it was their mistake and were 100% willing to pay! Ridiculous.<p>Every few times we'd exchange support emails it seemed like some new person would take over and never read the past emails so I had to repeat the same stuff multiple time. Ultimately I ended up emailing the CEO after I found some blog post where he said he wanted to personally hear from everyone and anyone. He never replied but the problem magically got fixed soon thereafter.<p>I fear the day I end up with really terrible hosts like you did because I have no faith AirBnb will actually be there for me.<p>Looking forward to trying housetrip, there really need to be a solid alternative to AirBnb.
I had a nightmare experience on vacation in Mexico that was word for word the same response from Airbnb. Because I took my wife and I out of the potentially dangerous rental, without first contacting Airbnb, they couldn't refund us anything. I followed up with evidence that the rental was unfit and unsafe with pictures, but nothing came of it. Needless to say, I'm never using Airbnb again. Worst customer experience I've ever had. Airbnb is essentially enabling any joe idiot to run a shit hotel anywhere in the world with zero accountability. Oh also, over the time you email their customer experience reps, they assign you a NEW customer rep each time so you have no relationship with whoever you talk to next during a conversation. Some people are understanding, others are a<i></i>holes. Such a terrible experience, overall. It's a wonder they're as big as they are.
<i>>Airbnb do not care about guests and their safety at all.</i><p>I don't know. 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.<p>It's nice that they were "all cool" with the host and decided to play musical buildings instead of contacting Airbnb right there, but when they did that, they went off the books and <i>severely limited Airbnb's ability to quickly and effectively</i> sort through the issue. A customer that didn't even book a room though the service had an issue and went with a "handshake" from the host to resolve it instead.<p>Let's walk through the alternate scenario.<p>Customer desiring a room actually books a room through AirBnB.<p>Customer arrives and hosts tells them the apartment is no longer available. Customer contacts AirBnB and the issue is dealt with right then and there, and the host is sanctioned properly.<p>No driving around in a strange city to a place you've never set eyes on, and if you want to book another apartment with the host, you do it on the books.
This is why hotel regulations popped up in the first place. If you don't want the government to crack down, you really need to protect your customers. If this happened to the son or daughter of a US Senator (I know it happened in Spain, but kids do take trips) then I would expect a whole world of problems.
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.<p>In this situation, what do you do?<p>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.<p>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.<p>I think for now, I will stop recommending Airbnb.
Its equally bad as a host. I have a place that rents very well in the summer (its near the Ocean) and a group of people showed up, didn't like it for whatever reason, and AirBNB canceled the reservation with no penalty despite there being a super clear cancelation policy in place.<p>No recourse (customer service blew me off: "sorry, renter didn't like the bed."), no way to rent it for a week on that short of notice, I lose $1000. Really shitty experience - I prioritize Holiday Lettings 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.<p>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.<p>It sounds like AirBnB could probably be nicer about this, but equally the author of this post <i>did</i> 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).<p>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?
Wow, what a nightmare. I'd like to think that they'd have my back in this kind of situation, but I guess not.<p>Personally, though, I've stayed in almost 40 different European Airbnb rentals over the past year and didn't have any problems. It's not risk-free, but it's certainly better than trawling through the local equivalent of Craigslist. (Granted, I mostly stayed with people renting out a spare room, so there was probably less of a chance of them being terrible or crazy.)<p>As with all booking services, I always engaged my sketchiness radar before booking. Does the host sound conversational in their listing? Do the photos have the Airbnb official photographer seal? (Or do they have lots of grainy photos interspersed with unrelated photos of attractions in the city?) Do they have a fleshed out profile with photos? Reviews? References? What do they sound like when I message them? Even on a supposedly safe booking service like Airbnb, it's important to assume that each listing is sketchy until proven otherwise. You can usually tell if a host has good intentions by taking these things into consideration.
Several months ago, members of my team at work booked various Airbnbs for a large conference in San Francisco.<p>We booked early to get a better deal, and I'm pretty sure a lot of Airbnb hosts didn't know the conference was coming up (or was that big).<p>As we got closer to the conference time, pretty much all of us had our stays canceled on us by the hosts. We were then forced to rebook at significantly higher rates. In some instances, even THESE got canceled by the hosts.<p>We're 99% sure that the hosts were given better offers and made the deals privately.<p>Having used Airbnb a few times now, I'm definitely seeing the benefits of hotels for peace of mind.
Sounds like they may have gotten into the tough space where choices were few and you take a Hobson's choice and get burned.<p>I've learned with Airbnb to be disciplined about ignoring any unreviewed listings and really only looking at listings that have at least 15 reviews over at least a year. It is clear that there are outright scammers using the site, as well as perhaps the well meaning but incompetent or those who play a little fast and loose, to be generous.<p>I almost booked a place in London for a Christmas stay 4 months out before I discovered through my own sleuthing that 100% of the listing photos were from a real estate listing for the flat and it was for sale.
Regarding the comments below the blog post, what is the point of countering him with anecdotes of good Airbnb experiences? Good experiences don't reveal anything about Airbnb itself, because the dispute mechanism isn't invoked; they are simply the result of a good host transacting with good guests (incidentally, by way of Airbnb).<p>That's like saying, "I've had only good experiences with ABC Insurance; their premiums are low, the coverage is great and their friendly staff answered all my questions." (Wonderful; but did you ever try to collect on a claim?)<p>Only reports of experiences of invoking <i>the critical use-case</i> are meaningful and relevant. A black spot in that area obliterates a thousand glowing reports about anything else.
I will never use Airbnb again, either. Booked a flat in London that looked clean in the pictures, but was disgusting when we got there. Also wound up paying walk-in rates at a Holiday Inn (which were astronomical, but at least the room was immaculate and modern). Fortunately, I always book travel with my American Express card—and <i>they</i> sure know how to handle disputed charges.
You have completely the wrong expectation of how Airbnb works. The hosts are randoms and Airbnb has no way to deliver a consistent quality experience like a hotel. Airbnb is like eBay, not Amazon.<p>You need to realize that when you get the last apartment in a city at conference-time (almost certainly not a superhost with good reviews), you're obviously taking a big gamble that it doesn't work out in order to save a few bucks.<p>> so we had to shell out 9 nights of walk-in rate hotel fees<p>So in this worst-case scenario you wound up in the same place as you would have if Airbnb didn't exist? Cry me a river.
Seems like a common theme in "sharing economy" companies - start off with a great concept and great execution, but once they become popular, some part of them just falls apart.<p>For uber, it's the way they treat their drivers. The churn is incredible. But as long as they continue to offer cheap rides and can lure new drivers in with empty promises, they'll continue to exist.
My ongoing first time experience forced me to create this basic question set. The realization is airbnb is no different from craigslist. There are no minimum standards/rules.
There are awesome deals out there. Only people with a good question set end up choosing a better deal and the rest get stuck with bad deals.<p>Room
1. Room size (width x length in ft)
2. What lighting do you have?. Or you have only one table lamp?
3. Is there a table?
4. Do you provide a towel?
5. Send me a picture of bed size and also the measurements.
(width x length in ft)
Please don't just say queen or king. I need the width and length. I have seen hosts mention the sizes incorrectly.
6. Do your personal belongins stay in the room?. Any don't touch belongings?
7. Does the room have a knob(inside) for privacy?
8. Is there a fan?
9. Total house built up area in square footage? (excluding garage)<p>Sharing
1. How many airbnb guests stay there?
2. How many guests I share the rest room with?
3. Is there space in the fridge for me?. How much (approx)?
4. What is the typical temperature maintained in the house?. Are there
guests with a requirement to keep the room warm despite me sweating?<p>Cleaning
1. What is the cleaning schedule for house?.
1. What is the cleaning schedule for rest rooms?.
2. Who do we call if the shared rest room is soiled?.<p>Location
1. Are there any loud sounds/noises from surroundings/roads at night?
I'm not trying to blame the victim here, but rule of thumb...never use AirBnB outside your own country and that goes double for Spain[1].<p>1) - Go to google, type in "AirBnB Spain", then look at the auto complete.
Customer service is a joke. I posted this on HN about a year ago.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005200" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005200</a><p>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 July, I went on a weekend trip to Victoria with my parents who I see two or three times a year. About an hour before we should have arrived at the accommodation, our hosts calls me and tells us his son needs the place so he needs me to log on airbnb and cancel our reservation. He was _very_ persistent and kept calling me and leaving messages, despite me telling him he needs to tell airbnb himself. I guess he wanted us to take the heat for cancellation instead.<p>I ended up spending most of my day communicating with airbnb, hotels and motels. Around 8pm I managed to score the last two hotel rooms in the city, and could finally join the rest of the family.<p>Airbnb did pay the difference between the hotel and our original reservation, but I still lost an entire day with my family.<p>Nowadays I only make airbnb reservations in big cities where coming up with on-the-spot backup is easy.
When I travel I don't have time for dealing with this crap. Hence, I overpay for hotels. Not foolproof by any means, but the big chains will generally be pretty legit and have the room you ask when you get there.
I must say, anecdotally, I have friends who have had similar, very scary, air bnb experiences, even in California. I stayed in an Air BNB in Baltimore with a dog that genuinely tried to bite me. I'm great with dogs, this one was crazy. And my girlfriend and I had a similar very uncomfortable experience in Rome, being moved from place to place and having our rooms double-booked ... I can't remember whether that particular reservation was booked through Air BNB or not, but the feeling is very unsettling not to mention a time and money drain.<p>I think the blog post is spot on, in that the customer and most vulnerable person in many of these instances should be thought of as the renter. Of course property damage to the host is a concern, but it can be seriously scary to be stuck somewhere strange feeling unsafe and with nowhere to go.<p>Compare to Uber. With Uber, if a driver gets many negative ratings, they are booted. Yet there are still many many drivers available here in NYC. I've talked with drivers, and they expressed a lot of concern about their ratings and how they are perceived.<p>Air BNB is failing to create a culture of accountability, and failing to step in quickly to make things better for people who use their marketplace. If at all possible, I think they should at least do more to address the edge cases. Unhappy, scared, customers are not going to use the service.<p>I love Air BNB, they are not dead to me, but if they don't address this well I am afraid competition or regulation might.
Shame there are no negative reviews on his apartment to cement this all together.<p>I think I'm right in thinking that both parties must review one another before it is published. Therefore why would he ever review your negative experience.
As a host themselves, they afforded the other host too much of a courtesy before reporting a bait and switch to AirBnB and letting them get involved. Getting the AirBnB team involved is more about leverage as the host doesn't want to get booted from the platform so they are more likely to not push you around taking you from apartment to apartment.<p>Also, what was the reputation and reviews on the host used?
Unless you are 21 and looking for an adventure use Hyatt, Hilton, ... when dealing with foreign countries especially if you don't speak the local language.
I just booked at AirBnB for the third time for an upcoming conference. The two previous times were a very good experience for me. All three times I'm getting prices way below alternative lodgings. I do take care to research the places and make sure to only use well reviewed hosts. I think that rather than make a dodgy AirBnB booking I'd pay more. I've booked hotel rooms that turned out to be rather shitty. This is a horror story to be sure. I think AirBnB dropped the ball but I can see their options narrow since the customer didn't complain immediately. They should kick the host regardless.
The root of these bad host stories seem to be that the guests arrive and don't immediately contact Airbnb about issues with the rental. Because of this, Airbnb just denies any liability and puts the blame on the renters instead of the host.<p>This seems trivial to solve -- Airbnb should make check-ins a mandatory part of all stays, and any issues with the accommodations would obviously be included in this initial check-in. There would be no chance for a host to move you across Barcelona before realizing you've been totally screwed or before Airbnb starts denying any and all responsibility for the problem.
Just because this thread is filled with negativity...<p>My wife and I have stayed in a bunch of airbnb's (Aptos CA, Oregon House CA, Portland OR, Palo Alto, CA, San Diego CA, Princeville & Kapa'a HI, Seville & Barcelona (Las Ramblas) Spain, Venice & Florence & Rome Italy, and maybe another one or two that I'm forgetting) and the experience has been well above average every single time and every one of them were cheaper than the hotel alternatives.<p>No idea what we're doing differently, but we meticulously look through reviews and make sure we exchange a few messages with each host before we book.
This happens with registered hotels and Expedia too. I had to be in Paris for a few days a couple of years ago so I chose a nice hotel on Expedia, and not very expensive as well. However, when I showed up, the hotel had no trace of the reservation. The manager didn't want to call Expedia because it would not change anything (no space left, he claimed). Instead, he very nicely called another hotel to find space for me. I even thanked him... However, the other hotel was the shittiest hotel I have ever stayed at and would probably not have survived a listing on the Internet. The manager there was crazy and the hotel was so bad they couldn't even manage to track which rooms were occupied by guests. And since it was a walk-in, I paid super high rates. While staying at that hotel, I heard multiple guests with the same story as me so it was not an isolated technical problem on the part of the local hotels (seems more than one hotel was in on it). When I complained to Expedia, it turned out the first hotel had cancelled the reservation right before I showed up so no foul for them (despite my never being told about it before showing up at the hotel). Expedia gave me a voucher in the end but the listing for that hotel stayed on the site.
AirBnB's customer service is undergoing growing pains.<p>We rented a place via AirBnB that seemed to have good reviews. Upon checking in, as soon as the lights were turned off, cockroaches came out and were crawling over us! So at 3AM I called AirBnB and wanted to get out. They helped me find another place, but I could not leave a review of the previous place! No wonder they had such good reviews! It defeats the purpose of a review if you can't leave really bad ones.
This is the Groupon/Kickstarter/Ebay problem. Everything is awesome until something goes wrong. Then the user leaves forever, and tells their friends. Trust is broken.<p>Eventually the loses mount and the company crumbles from bad press.<p>Amazon fixes this with 10/10 customer service. The only known solution.
I've had some horrible experience with Airbnb in LA. One place has close to perfect reviews (the lowest scored category is 8/10 in cleanliness), but the place is dirtier than a gas station's bathroom (smelly sheets, moldy showers, dirty old floor and squeaky bed). I've never met the host in person and he ran this thing like a refugee camp; there are about 50 people living in that (fairly large) complex and no one seemed happy. I went back to hotels/hostels after that experience.
I think there are a handful of hosts that do not care about their guest' experience and instead are mostly focused on the financial gain of renting out their place. That being said, I'm an airbnb host who has rented out my 2nd bedroom in nyc to some of the most amazing individuals I've ever met, and many of them are some of my best friends now.<p>It really depends on the host. And I think that 90% are fantastic.
A sample size of n=1 is an anecdote not data. Totally horrible experience but seemed to hinge on a particularly bad actor with knowledge of how best to exploit customers and airbnb. It is pretty shitty, I hope they make it right because it sounds like you acted in good faith, but this seems like a really complicated edge case.<p>I had a similar experience this week with Dashlane (a password mgnt app) where i installed it and it corrupted >70 passwords locking me out of vital accounts. This is why my HN UN is green for instance. Customer support was totally shit for a while but I tweeted them and they responded and actually read my responses. I ended up losing all the data but they[0] <i>eventually</i> provided some time to look into the issue deeper as well as a free 12 month account. Should they have helped me better up front, when the data may still have been recoverable? I think NO, but want to say yes. I had a free account and didnt had non-traditional settings. So while i would gladly trade the free account for my credentials back I bear some responsibility. I AM NOT INDICATING YOU(or the writer) ARE RESPONSIBLE. My point is that some situations are really shitty and are not indicative of the experience/views of an organization. If this occurs only very rarely, conpanies can still have a great business and unfortunately some people will be casualties to circumstance<p>[0]xavier, if you are reading this. Thanks for the account credit and making things right, Cheers!
My opinion is that when you're using something like AirBnB, you can't expect hotel level service when things go wrong... instead of making last minute decisions, research the place a bit - look through the comments, start up a thread of conversation with the host to make sure they can communicate in your language...
First, sorry to hear about your experience.<p>I wonder if you would have any luck escalating this to Chesky, Gebbia, et al. The Airbnb founding team really seems to take pg's advice on start-ups seriously. I'm sure that they're huge proponents of delighting their users, which your experience obviously isn't an example of.
Had a very bad experience with airbb support too.. Appartment was digusting and not as advertised. airbnb refused to help.
1500 euro gone, as we moved to something else.<p>I've had a bit too many bad experiences with the offerings of hosts and service of airbnb.<p>I hope this unicorn will die, and will be replaced by something proper
Sounds like a horrific experience but unfortunately, it's hard to assign much credibility to the OP. Sounds very difficult to deal with. Like, no, a random photo from a balcony in no way proves that you weren't staying somewhere else.
We had good luck with Airbnb in the past, but only because of good (great) hosts. I have a feeling therein lies the rub - Airbnb's business model assumes a good host and a good guest, and when that falls short everything falls apart.
This is an attempt to get a refund from AirBnB, right?<p>Has HN become a back channel customer service platform for YC companies?<p>Unfortunately since it seems to work so well. I expect we will see more of this.
Hmmm. I won't repeat my qualms with AirBnB. I'm afraid that this comment will get downvoted/banned in a bit, and like any negative post/discussion about AirBnB, the discussion will mysteriously disappear from the front page…
For me it's the same as hotels, but with less service. I've relocated to SFBA a year ago, and it was cheaper to rent Extended Stay America rather than AirBnB with weird rules. We had a kid, and one guy was mentioning "no dogs or kids" in his AD. That's ridiculous! DOGS OR KIDS! O-k-a-y. Will never never never use AirBnB again.
TL;DR: friends had a bad experience once with Airbnb, will not use again.<p>This is not about Airbnb as a business strategy or work place or UX etc.<p>Speaking of UX, I do find that Airbnb does a pretty good job at managing expectations and making sure people find their fit (I don't have any figure though).