Airbnb removed my below review because "The review didn’t have enough relevant information to help the Airbnb community make informed booking or hosting decisions."
The rating of the place went back up after removal. The host still have "superhost" status.
Needless to say, i no longer trust airbnb reviews.
*my full review was:
I wasn't able to check in because [Host] requested 300 USD security deposit during check in. I told her - I don't have that much cash on me. - That is against AirBnB rules. - This should have been explained in airbnb listing. She can't just surprise guests with this at the last minute. She didn't listen. She said: "my house my rules", "you can't tell me how to run my business", "if you don't like it, you can cancel". I told her if i cancel, i don't get full refund so she should cancel. she said she won't cancel and me not getting refund is not her problem. I think she counts on the fact that guests typically wouldn't want to cancel in the last minute. you can see in some other reviews people had to agree to paying her this deposit. But i didn't want to cave in and called AirBnB. Thankfully, airbnb fully refunded the payment and i was able to find another accomodation in the last minute. I don't recommend this host unless you want a stressful start for your vacation.
They said they have found an existing relationship between me and the host. Mind you have no social media accounts, this was my first stay at an Airbnb, I'm from USA and this was in Medellin Colombia, I usually stay at Marriott hotels and I only went with Airbnb because the girl I traveled with suggested using it because it was cheaper.
It was awesome place, host was great, so left a fantastic review. It was taken down and I was called a liar. When I asked to speak with someone about why I'm accused of being a liar in my review customer support promised me many times I would get a call back. Never once did I receive a call back from anyone at Airbnb instead I would get an email that they had conducted a thorough review and their position still stands that I am a liar. I'm not sure what thorough means in their mind but since they asked me zero questions or confirmed no information with me directly it's impossible that they conducted any kind of thorough review.
Airbnb is a horrendous company along with all of these gig economy companies. They need to be regulated in the same manner as they're non-gig counterparts are. I can't imagine that any Airbnb executive actually stays at Airbnb places not with the kind of customer service that Airbnb offers.
Personally though I've come to appreciate hotels more and my experience is that you can usually find a decent hotel room for about what an AirBNB costs and I usually like going to a hotel better. (There was that one in Chinatown in NYC that the experience of finding it was somewhere between The Blade Runner and a James Bond movies, I'm not sure if that is a good review or not.)
Honestly, there was not much else it could do in the long term.
There's no good answer to this. Anyone that allows/relies on direct consumer feedback is at risk for one of the hardest problems that exist.
Personally, I want to know people's great and real experiences, or terrible ones, who wouldn't!? But, once you tie it to money, it's over.
Compare reviews on Steam to reviews on Airbnb. You'll quickly notice something, Steam shows you far more information at a glance. You get to know whether someone bought the game themselves or if it was given free to them, how many hours they played before the review, how many hours they played in total, their rating, how other people feel about that review, how many other products the user has, if the review was edited, and of course review text.
Airbnb's reviews has a scoring system that was generalized, and review text, maybe a translation badge if the review was translated.
Reviews work best when you are given as much information as possible. Without it, you might as well be relying on an anonymous 5 star system.
I don’t trust sites like Airbnb and I understand how sites have problems with review fraud.
If I posted with a unique signature then over time people could learn that mine aren’t fake.
Also would be nice to know that the Airbnb reviewer also rated a restaurant and some headphones, etc.
True but also one they’ve created for profit. They choose to ignore complaints about hosts to avoid losing their fees, they choose not to audit reviews, etc. There’s an entire industry of people who get paid to do mystery shopping to review customer experiences, which is quite effective but not free since you can’t automate it at scale.
This seems like it’s basically a VC playbook now: focus on growth numbers and assume you’ll be able to convey the shiny tech imagine until you reach market dominance, and avoid spending money visibly on “menial” jobs to support the image that you are about to be unbelievably profitable.
I wonder if "tipping" could improve things.
A new platform like airbnb could have an expected tip built in to the platform. Hosts are expected to provide good service and get a tip.
Customers are encouraged to tip at the end of their stay (with a lower base price than airbnb to account for that).
Hosts can see the average, median, max, and min tips of potential customers (along with distribution, and percentage calculations) and use that to determine whether to accept them as a guest.
Customers can see the average tip a listing received, and use that to determine if they'd want to stay there. Of course, they would sometimes leave $0 or a low number as a tip, but they'd be incentivized to also provide good tips for good service, because a low tip average would reflect poorly on them and make them less likely to be hosted.
I suspect tying things to real value for the customer and host would lead to better service and a more honest indication of host/customer quality.
But perhaps it would just lead to hosts literally bribing customers for good tips.
See what happens if you ask a bank for a loan with no credit history.
Of course these are only tangentially alike, but public history is an important way to distinguish organic reviews from AstroTurf.
You also don't need a social account to login, so how would Airbnb even know that user named "John Smith" on Twitter is you?
Edit: I should have expanded on my post a bit. It's quite obvious that the review was flagged by some ML model, most likely not because the reviewer is a liar but probably because the host has a high prior for shenanigans. Combined with the lack of social signals for the reviewer, I could see why an ML model might be overzealous. But back to my original question: nobody is being called a liar, why take it so personally?
That’s how you’re supposed to know where is worth staying and where isn’t.
If those can’t be trusted, then it’s an inferior B&B platform with doctored reviews that you can’t trust.
My advice to those reading this is just to get a hotel unless there is no alternative.
AirBnB was fine for a bit when it was cheaper than alternatives, but, in my experience, it’s now as expensive (if not more) as the hotels they’re trying to replace.
There’s usually a massively inferior experience when compared to Hotels the majority of the time. At least, that’s been my experience.
In 2008-2011 on HN if someone worked at facebook you knew because they mentioned it so often.
Now you never hear anyone saying they work for Facebook because of all the negative externalities that Facebook and Instagram have had on the world that no one wants to be associated with them.
AirBnB is now in a similar situation.
When tehy first came out you would get lots of positive feedback from people about their service.
now that they allow whole home rentals and people are getting squeezed for living space and rising rents partially due to AirBnb taking those rentals off the market people have a far different opinion of the company.
Couple that with hosts are squeezing people with 100's of dollars in cleaning and other fees that dwarf the nightly rental costs.
Its hard to think of another company outside of Facebook that has blown all their good will so quickly and so completely.
You never hear someone claim to work at AirBnB anymore due to what the company has done to help ruin housing and rental markets.
Charitably I guess you could say that every company falls victim to the saying "You Either Die A Hero Or Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain."
AirBnB really just provided a modern online interface with some customer service stuff that papered over the bad stuff for a while. But like with actual bad construction, you can't hide the stuff forever so sooner or later the magic disappears.
In theory zoning is supposed be in residents interest to stop things like fracking from happening next to playgrounds (it doesn't but again that's another story). Cities follow zoning law to the letter when it comes to new apartments.
Airbnb repurposes residential zoned property as commerical hotels. If we're going to take zoning seriously this shouldn't be allowed.
We were contemplating what to do with this information as the listing is under "entire place" when a few days later we got an email from Airbnb saying that there was a price adjustment of +$395 for cleaning PER DAY. We had it booked for 5 days so we needed to pay an additional $~2000. That was more than double the original cost. Thankfully we were able to cancel and get our deposit back with just the automated cancellation, but we did get a nasty message from the host that we we reported back to Airbnb.
Twitter comes rapidly to mind
The real solution is to tax each additional dwelling ~30,000$ (depending on area) to pay for the infrastructure to support it and then actually build that infrastructure.
It’s a job - for many people, especially with families, they are fine with that, and they don’t wrap up their identity with it.
The same happens in the defense industry.
I hear this a lot. I've always wondered if it was that easy wouldn't a lot more people be buying properties and airbnb-ing them out through local agencies ?
From what I've seen, short term rentals have negligible effects on the housing market. And restrictions on short term rentals have little to no effect on housing prices. It's just another scapegoat (like foreign owned housing) that people like to use because they can't accept the fact that the solution is to BUILD MORE HOUSING. (Reduce restrictions like exclusionary zoning and environmental/community reviews)
The city has passed laws to keep down the amount of temporary rentals so the balance has undoubtably shifted by now. A later analysis by the same bank (https://bnb-beheer.nl/blog/2019/03/06/prijseffect-airbnb-op-...) says as much.
If you live in a ski town or beach town then it probably has had far more effect than the locals looking to buy or rent would want. if you live in a small town with very little tourism then people may feel like you do that its a non factor.
New York city seems to think that 10,000 distinct places to live will come back to the market, is 10,000 units in New York "negligible" to use your wording?
I don't know but I'm guessing it will have some measurable effect.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/28/1145709106/nyc-could-lose-10-...
Kauai is one of my favorite Hawaiian islands and has one of the strictest short term rental regulations. I truly believe if short term rentals are free for all it would end up being a billionaire's playground (more so than it already is) with no locals being able to afford housing at all.
It changes depending on the location.
Some places e.g. Byron Bay in Australia have been significantly affected by short term rentals.
I've read people talking about how Airbnb screwed the host or the guest. But few people talk about how it screws the neighbors.
Our neighbors on the other side, unfortunately, own their home. This means I'm forced to live next to (depending on the day of the week), a live concert venue, a muscle car engine noise appreciation celebration, frat parties, and/or a farm (they had a goat for a week ?).
There's nothing anyone can (or will) do about any of these things, and no one's checking their papers to determine if ignoring the noise is your only recourse. The only way to attempt to improve the situation is show respect and hope it's eventually reciprocated. This is just part of living around other humans. The systems in place to mitigate these kinds of petty conflicts aren't taken seriously, whether the rental is long or short term, or the property tax kind.
With who? I don't have a neighbor, I have an endless string of rotating strangers. I understand that bad neighbors have always existed, but that's not what's happening in my specific situation.
Anyone and everyone has potential access to the house 30 feet or so from which I sleep. Anyone and everyone at any time. It's a big change.
In the US, and California specifically, any kind of zoning change is met with pitchforks. If your neighbor tried to build an apartment and you didn't like it you could have easily held up the project for years.
Airbnb figured a way to rezone property without invoking the wrath of local busybodies. Kudos to them. But at the same time, if you live in a place that takes zoning seriously then Airbnb shouldn't be allowed.
This so much.
There's a neighbor on the street with a 'unique' house who decided the way she would make money is AirBnB'ing it to film companies. So...a weekend or two a month (usually Th-Mo), we would have 50-60 cars parked wherever they wanted on our narrow street and sidestreets. We would have vans and delivery vehicles block our driveways and sometimes the whole street for as long as they wanted. They would drive over lawns to position trucks because the street is too narrow for a 20+ foot cargo truck to back into the driveway to unload. They would film until 3, 4, sometimes 5 in the morning with loud noise, dozens of people and floodlights. If we said anything, they would mob us and start filming us trying to get us to lose our tempers. Whenever the cops showed up, they would shut down and play nice until they left, and then crank back up. And every one of them didn't get the required city permits until after we complained.
Lovely people in the film industry. /s
The city has regulations against such abusive behavior but not the resources to enforce, and no real recourse when the film companies basically gave the city the middle finger. They're going to be gone in a couple of days so screw those pesky neighbors. So we became the squeaky wheel to get some action. We eventually had to get a lawyer to get this shut down. And you bet there's a bunch of us at the city council meetings lobbying for better enforcement. It looks like we'll get some new regs passed with more teeth.
And, of course, AirBnB didn't care one bit.
I enjoy the fact that I get new neighbors all the time because, quite simply... in the past, I've lived next door to people I didn't like at all. When that happens, what can you do, move? This way, if there is an unruly renter, I just call the owner of the condo and they deal with it (only happened once in the last year). Worst case, they leave on their on in a few days.
This puts me off the idea of ever renting out my own place, because I would then have to choose between feeling like a sucker, or being a criminal.
So far most renters have been friendly or kept to themselves. Some were noisy, and some left dozens of cigarette butts on the sidewalk and street, and for the past couple weeks the place has been empty. No one has even come by to put away the trash bins.
The owner has over a dozen houses like this, and I really think it's a bad thing that these houses are not available to people who want to live in them.
Where I live now is area of all single family homes. One house on my street is also a full time Airbnb. There have been fewer issues, but there was one occasion where some people rented the house, threw a party in the house, shots were fired, and bullets went through a neighboring house. There have never been issues at this level in the neighborhood, so this was out of the ordinary.
Not all short term, full time Airbnbs are disrespectful. Not all long term, non-Airbnb neighbors are respectful. But IMO, with non-Airbnb neighbors, you have a better chance of working something out since they are there for the long haul.
What say should you have in how your neighbor uses their house?
You can live in an HOA with covenants that restrict renting, but that has their own set of problems.
What does having a say look like?
I lived in a town house association where the unit’s being rented were the source of noise, trash, crime, etc.
People renting often don’t care as much for the neighborhood/ locals and they can move on at will. And you'd be surprised how much random citizen land lords are terrible at just being land lords.
After the numbers of rentals were reduced (and background checks required) the neighborhood improved greatly. It was like turning off a light switch on noise, litter, crime, etc...
The people behind me have done it a few times. How can i tell they had "guests" over?
I find beer bottles, coke cans and garbage on MY property. There is the obvious noise from the late night "pool parties" as well.
Normally people dont care what their neighbours do, but when it starts to impact others, people start to care.
Neighborhoods have a lot of societal norms, my house has frequently been referred to as "the rental" even though I've lived here for years and the prior tenants also all had long runs here... even being a rental house in the neighborhood is considered strange here.
People have been turned away when they show up by security as it’s not allowed but the people just try to sneak them in. When reporting this to airbnb they refuse to do anything. I’m getting fairly sick of the laissez faire stances these companies are taking. It’s not just that we don’t want airbnb its that people in this area regularly rent airbnb with false names and rob the apartment and the ones next to it once in the building. Airbnb could care less about our safety though.
It would be nice if the companies could stop hiding behind stupid corporate policies and actually care about people.
Edit: to make things more sad when the building was sold as it’s brand new it was sold as no airbnbs and family only. Several couples moved in because they have been previously robbed in other buildings in the city and in nearby ones all from Airbnb rentals with false names.
“The platform does not have the capability to delist a whole community currently but our Friendly Buildings Program does allow you to have complete transparency and control over home-sharing activity in your community. You would be able to set minimums number of guests, blackout dates, amenity restrictions, or even create a waiting list if you want only a small number of homes to have the home-sharing amenity.
We understand in order to be able to control home-sharing, you would have to allow it in some capacity and change your CC&Rs, which is a process. Since our program establishes a partnership between Airbnb and your community, we would love to support in any way possible or even send someone to propose the idea to your board and fellow homeowners in person.”
So in other words, you either work with them or they let things happen anyway.
From time to time you spot underappreciated comments here. This is one of them
AirBnB, Lyft, Uber, etc - their entire business model is predicated on skirting regulations.
Then people are surprised they don't keep honest negative reviews? Why would a company which is knowingly violating rules care about your negative review?
They make money from hosts putting their places up for rent, not from those renting and if a negative review causes a listing to be removed... Clearly it is far more economical to remove the review instead.
I'd been finding bags of rubbish in the corridor, or in a recycling bin, and was woken several times by wheely suitcases bump-bump-bumping down the stairs early on a Monday.
Denmark changing the tax laws to require AirBNB to report short-term rental income for tax also helped.
Those willing to ignore HOA rules are often willing to ignore local tax collection rules so contacting your local tax authority to let them know you suspect someone violating the local tax laws is an option. Even when the planning officials were hesitant to get involved the tax folks were willing.
I have reported realtors which own or have close connections to those owning short term units violating HOA rules to the state licensing board. My experience is that realtors willing to knowingly violate HOA rules have often previously been censured by the licensing board for other issues. This in particular has been amazingly effective at getting units quickly removed and listed for sale. Once the listing is removed I withdraw my complaint and I have never had to follow through to completion.
Luckily once the registration laws went into effect there have only been a couple of people attempting to do short term rentals in my HOA and reporting them locally has ended those attempts.
The governance is definitely poorly structured, though. In my (limited) experience I've seen a board that gets elected and then proceeds to abuse their power to advance their own financial positions.
I think there should be a 3rd party company that competes for the management contract and annual contracts are awarded based off democratic vote from all the owners.
Violate its rules and you're a goner. Don't pay their "taxes", whether literal taxes or AirBnB taxing you by having you pay via your labor in changing your home, curating your listing(s) on AirBnB, writing reviews on AirBnB, being responsive above a percentile set by AirBnB, etc.
All as AirBnB demands. No input from you.
I'm never trusting online reviews anymore. Especially when the companies pull BS like this.
Edit: I just revisited the original email that I got from Amazon. They rejected my review because I left feedback about the seller, so I went to their seller feedback portal and left a message and never got a response. I still feel like this is a dark practice though, a review highlighting the fact the seller is farming 5 star reviews should still be posted, even though it's about the seller and not the product.
Ideally Amazon would do something against this, but I think they just don‘t care.
They both arrived the very same day.
From the seller addresses on the package, I could know which pair were coming from Doc Marteens website and which pair were coming from the amazon seller.
I put the pairs side by side to compare them.
At first sight, you couldn't tell the differences, but once you got close it was very clear there were not the sames : - The laces were thinner on the fake one. - The leather were thinner on the fake one. - The sole were differents, with different markts and scripture. - The logo at the back of the shoes was very badly reproduced.
The amazon seller had recorded an obviously fake address situated in New York city. The front of the address on google map was a store which has nothing to do with shoes or clothing business.
I posted a review telling the shoes were fake and the seller was selling counterfeit products and had posted a fake address.
Amazon informed me 24 hours later they had removed my review because I didn't stitch to only review the shoes.
Read all bad stuff about AirBnB on reddit, you see where airbnb is heading. People should stop using that platform, whenever you find an alternative.
The incentives are different at different levels of the business. There could be someone with a shorter-term outlook making these decisions, or (more likely imo) it was a very quick misapplication of the policy based on skimming the review. Acting as a first reviewer actually seems like a great application of LLMs, where attention won't flag + they can hopefully be tuned to only focus on the policy-relevant pieces.
If those reviews help you decide to buy from someplace other than Amazon... perhaps in short term or narrow circumstances it still helps Amazon (reduced refunds/etc).
AirBnB needs to immediately get rid of all fees for rentals and enforce that there's just 1 base price charged. The price you see on a listing should be the only price ever possibly charged. Between silly cleaning and toilet paper and checkin and other fees, there's too much of an opportunity for scummy people to try and take advantage of people that are tired and desperate after traveling.
Virtually all of the conflicts, scammy behavior, and confusion would be resolved if there was just 1 base price that was ever charged.
It's the startup dream.
We should aim to do better somehow.
Unlike Airbnb, if users lose trust in their reviews, Yelp loses their entire business.
source: I am ex-yelper.
Yelp is worse than AirBNB.
Even though whatever Yelp does is not illegal, it engages in unethical practices: "[R]emoving positive reviews wasn’t extortion because Yelp didn’t have to publish those reviews at all. Third, publishing or showcasing negative reviews wasn’t extortion because Yelp has the legal right “to post and sequence the reviews.” Finally, the plaintiffs claimed Yelp wrote bogus reviews to punish non-advertisers, but the plaintiffs didn’t provide adequate evidence that Yelp wrote those negative reviews instead of someone else. For example, even if a business couldn’t find records matching the reviewer’s details, that doesn’t mean Yelp falsified that review (compare the Yelp v. Hadeed case, which in a different legal context gave more benefit of the doubt to an aggrieved business with similar claims)."
I was a very early user of Airbnb and started using it back in 2012, when the platform was still mostly folks renting out extra bedrooms in their homes, and occasionally full house rentals (less commercially-run than nowadays). For a good few years it was always a positive experience, and most of them had a human touch to them (good interactions with hosts, etc.).
A few years later it has gotten commercialized enough that I basically just consider it a commercial short term house rental platform. In the past few years, stories like this post is so common that I'm hesitant to book one unless absolutely needed (can't stay at a hotel at my destination for various reasons, e.g. large group wanting a house, etc.).
What's the future path for this? There's obviously a market need for something like this. Is it a move toward more decentralized small boutique short term rental management companies (maybe geographically dispersed too)? And for platforms like Airbnb to move back to strictly renting out extra rooms in a house you live in?
"Reviews were stunning, the location was great, the price was reasonable".
Then, I went on explaining that I landed in front of a closed door, the host was not reachable, Booking.com support was not helpful, so I just drove on through the night and over mountains until I reached home 11 hours later.
After I made the review, Booking.com only kept the first sentence.
Since then, I try ordering directly from hosts or hotel chains.
Booking.com gave us a refund after a 2 hour call and offered us $20. They removed our negative review because "you didn't stay at the property and were refunded".
I am strictly hotels only after the shenanigans from AirBnB and Booking.com.
(1) https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.airbnb.com (1.3/5)
For instance, I had a week long stay booked in a “waterfront, two bedroom” in London. I needed the two bedrooms to set up an office that wouldn’t disturb my partner. Arrived at the place, and it was a one bedroom, not waterfront but the building’s communal deck had a water view.
Host was obnoxious about it. Airbnb support couldn’t find me a suitable Airbnb and booked me a two bedroom suite at a VERY nice hotel, worth much much more than I had paid for the rental. I am pretty sure they ate the host’s payout too as the place didn’t re-appear as available.
Another issue I have found is that many of the listings on Airbnb are not by the owner, but by some person acting independently as a broker. I have found this in many different countries. This may explain why, when I tried to request a booking, it was not available. The actual property owner had already rented it to someone else. Further, once the broker/host gives the owner the rent, there is no way to get any kind of a refund if there is an issue. The owner has no affiliation with Airbnb. The 'host' no longer has the money. And, Airbnb does not want to pay the expense. So, the guest is left hanging. Maybe they, too, can submit a review that the host will have removed. It's disgusting.
If risking the use of Airbnb, be very careful when a 'host' says a property is not available, but provides a link to a different property. It may have a very different cancellation policy than the original property.
Airbnb claims in their FAQ pages they want to be authentic. But, they seem to be authentic only in the support of their bottom line, even if that requires dishonesty in other areas to achieve.
Because of the combination of different issues, I have decided Airbnb can no longer be trusted. I now prefer to book hotels or apartments through competitor sites. I encourage others to do the same.
I'm fully open to this possibility, we shouldn't take them at their word, but it may also have been a half truth (they couldn't see your review but they could see their average go down).
The host had been living outside the US for the last couple years, and hadn't seen their house in person for a very long time. They happened to come back after we checked out, and decided to blame all the Wear and Tear from the last couple years on us. Wear and Tear is not something hosts are supposed to be able to charge damage fees for, but they rung us up for a massive damages fee (thousands of USD). We refuted the charge with Airbnb, providing our video evidence which directly countered each of the host's claims.
Airbnb didn't care and made us pay. Even though we've used Airbnb many times, I guess the host was still worth more to Airbnb than us as guests. We left a review describing the experience, and the host countered with their negative review of us. The cherry on top is that we forgot to logout of all our video streaming services from their TV, and the host's last last petty move was to delete all our user profiles from all our services.
I had an experience where, after arriving in town, the host denied me entry because they thought my negative COVID test result was faked.
That was bad. But what was completely insane was that Airbnb refused to refund my money. They only offered me $200 back on a $500 charge. Ridiculous.
I'm in the process of arbitration right now. Here's the guide: https://fairshake.com/airbnb/arbitrating-with-airbnb/
That policy falls short in instances like this where a guest cannot or will not check in due to issues with the host.
You might also try calling AirBnB again and see if you can convince them to put the review back up.
BTW, $300 cash deposit is absurd. AirBnB already has a security deposit mechanism that the host could use.
This sent off a lot of red flags as AirBnB specifically says not to compile with this.
Calling AirBnB was useless. They confirmed that we should not pay the deposit, but it was up the the host to cancel our booking since it was less than 24hours away. AirBnB says as long as the booking is active then we have a right to be there. I share AirBnB's response with the host and they said they would call the cops if we showed up.
Two more calls to AirBnB, including one the morning of the booking and they still needed the host to cancel the booking. And since I "requested" the cancellation the host wasn't charged for cancelling my booking the same day.
After using AirBnB off and on for several years, this left a very sour taste.
I was not allowed to even post a review.
Tip for the future: buy a good guidebook (or several). They have listings of hotels with price estimates, whether BnB is a good idea or not, and what the legal requirements are how to handle them when things go wrong.
Easy refund right? I had videos AND pictures of the whole thing (multiple kitchen cabinets, about 5-10 roaches on their backs each. smallish 1/2cm german roaches). Submitted it to AirBnB. What happened after was a complete shitshow that I never want to go through again and is the reason I will never use this service.
* Automated customer service kept closing our case because we were traveling and did not respond immediately to their questions in 12-24 hours (got basic questions like CAN YOU PLEASE DESCRIBE THE ISSUE? despite having submitted 10 images of ROACHES). Each time your case closes you get a different representative so we had to re-iterate the same story.
* AirBnB passed responsibility of refunding off to the host, who was playing dumb with us and was basically non-responsive for a week and pretended like nothing was off. They (host) later admitted to the airbnb rep that they did pay for regular pest control services.
* AirBnB told us we were not eligible for a refund because there were not obvious signs that it was a health hazard (such as bed bugs). What? This was extremely puzzling.So if you can't find proof of bed bugs you're SOL?
* Unrelated to the pests, but the host charged us an additional $100 as part of our stay for cleaning fee despite the fact that we left immediately and the only things that were out of place were the kitchen cabinets opened containing dozens of roach carcasses. Try making sense of that.
All in all after some pretty heated exchanges with the reps at airbnb and threats to publish the images online to expose the host they relented and gave me my refund. Will never go through this again with them.
Seriously, one day I left a buddy of mine leave 3 box of stuffs in my appartment because he was moving in another place... 3 months later I saw the very first roach on the open... They were everywhere, hidding in every corners in small groups, even in a f*cking hole punch...
Long story short, I finally get rid of them by buying on the web a kind of pasta in a big seringe with some kind of poison in it which acted at molecular level (or something) and prevented the roaches cells to absorb energy from blood stream. In short, they were dying of starvation even if they were eating. The poison passed also in their shit (because roaches eat their shit to be more discreet), so even their shit became poisonous.
That being said, they would likely not survive a nuclear apocalypse, contrary to the popular belief : https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/would-cockroaches-re...
I ended up being able to negotiate a partial refund, but I still lost around $800.
The same place was listed on agoda.com which is fully refundable up to 24 hours prior to checkin and I've always had good experience with agoda support.
I'll never, NEVER, use airbnb again. It's a scam company.
This is for several reasons. Firstly I stay in the places much longer than the average guest, so notice flaws more than someone that is there for a whirlwind visit. Some things are taste based as well.
But also because I understand that often it's a small business and by leaving negative reviews I'm fucking with someones livelihood (this varies from place to place and I'm far more likely to leave a review if it's company owned).
In the few times I have left negative reviews they have to be horrendously bad. Bad to the point that I can't stay (as the OP was).
Given how much I stay in AirBnBs I've also learned to read between the lines. Often you can tell more about the place by what is consistently not mentioned. If people consistently rave about everything it's a good sign. If people give half hearted positive reviews (one nice thing only maybe), that's probably a sign that you're going to want to give a negative review and bite your tongue.
There used to be a time, when people used AirBnB to get some extra money when they did not need their apartment. Not to earn their living. That was one good reason why AirBnB was successful in the beginning.
Now people are making business with the help of AirBnB. And it has brought nothing good. The price of living increases for locals and they can’t own their home. Those small businesses which can afford multiple apartments so that part can be in AirBnB 24/7, do not have problems on making the living. They just want to get richer by doing nothing.
At least here in north Europe, you need hundreds of thousands of investments in euros before you can make your living, and assuming you have loans. If you don’t have, then your living does not depend on it.
> But i didn't want to cave in and called AirBnB. Thankfully, airbnb fully refunded the payment and i was able to find another accomodation in the last minute. I don't recommend this host unless you want a stressful start for your vacation.
I'm pretty sure your review got removed because you didn't actually check in. I'm actually surprised the system even let you write a review given the circumstances you've outlined.
My experience, for reference: A couple stayed on our second floor, and left dozens of snotty tissues all around the apartment, put recylables in the trash, and just kind of left the place a mess. No permanent damage, and otherwise, were perfectly fine guests. I gave them five stars for everything but cleanliness, and this man LOST HIS MIND about this new stain on his ratings. Claimed he didn't do anything, reacted poorly when I added pictures to the thread, made excuses, begged for me to change the review (I couldn't!), and eventually accused me of being homophobic (?!?!). Thing is, he lived an Amtrak ride away, and was acting irrational enough that I was worried about further escalation, so eventually I contacted Airbnb and asked them to take my review down.
Her negative review was removed after a complaint by the host, and then the host proceeded to libel her in the review they made with false statements. It took a battle and sending loads of pictures to AirBNB to get them to remove the false review of her and restore the negative review of the place.
Needless to say, I lost of a lot of trust in AirBNB that day. The "air cover" guarantee isn't worth the paper it's printed on. We've gone from 50:50 hotels:airbnb to hotels only, outside of extremely specific cases.
But it had damn near a five-star rating and the reviews were like "great place for my family!" et c. Something shady was going on, both with the host and with AirBnB, to make that happen, I'd say. It was shockingly bad.
Uber, AirBnB, Netflix, Facebook come to mind.
Content that some people dislike is way different than [0]driving taxis out of business, [1]contributing to housing crunch, and [3]driving civil wars/genocide.
> If you link, connect, or login to the Airbnb Platform with a third party service (e.g. Google, Facebook, WeChat), you direct the service to send us information such as your registration, friends list, and profile information as controlled by that service or as authorized by you via your privacy settings at that service.
> For Members in the United States, to the extent permitted by applicable laws, we may obtain, for example, reports of criminal records, sex offender registrations, and other information about you and/or your background
> To the extent permitted by applicable law, we may receive additional information about you, such as references, demographic data, or information to help detect fraud and safety issues from third party service providers and/or partners, and combine it with information we have about you. For example, we may receive background check results or fraud warnings from identity verification service providers for use in our fraud prevention and risk assessment efforts. We may receive information about you and your activities on and off the Airbnb Platform, or about your experiences and interactions from our partners. We may receive health information, including but not limited to, health information related to contagious diseases.
- Friends list - "Other information about you and your background" - References - Information about you on and off the Platform - Experiences from our partners - Receive health information, including but not limited to,contagious diseases.
Awful experience, and I've sworn them off ever since. Very stereotypical "friendly but can't do anything" human customer support.
Small technicality, but the review asks you to rate how clean the place is, what condition it’s in, etcetera — you probably wouldn’t have been able to rate those honestly having not stayed.
Some of this rides a thin line in the sense that you made it far enough through the booking to have technically left a review, but wouldn’t have been able to if you had the dispute earlier. In other cases (ones I’ve personally experienced), I’ve had hosts who were jerks and I canceled before ever getting close to the check in time. In that case, you can’t leave a review on AirBnB or Turo. The only punishment to the host is lost revenue and lost opportunity.
At the very least you know the host lost revenue for this. It can be difficult to get a new booking in such short notice.
It's open to abuse. We've been screwed over by hosts who cancel at the last minute (eg they couldn't find anywhere else to stay). There's literally nothing you can do.
I stayed at a horrible place offered by a so-called "superhost". It had super thin walls and a bathroom where the shower flowed into the main room. It was hot with no real window and no way for the air to flow (it was built out of an old garage).
I left a critical review saying all those things.
The host was able to get it removed because the review contained comments about "things the owner couldn't change". This is apparently a well-known trick that hosts share on dedicated forums.
I have learned from that experience that Airbnb reviews can't be trusted and that the "superhost" badge doesn't mean anything (other than the fact that said host is an expert at navigating Airbnb's bureaucracy).
I would be switching to Booking.com for now and not going to use AirBnb anymore. But from what I am reading here, seems like they aren't that good with their customer care as well?
Airbnb is expected this year to make changes so prices are more transparent and this plays into that. Things have been trending towards the car rental model where you can rent a car for $1 a day but by the time you add in all the fees it’s closer to $200/day but you don’t find that out until the very last stage of the checkout. Airlines used to do the same thing then ~6 years ago they were forced to disclose everything up front.
I’m planning to list a place on Airbnb soon, am going to bake all the fees into the base price except for unauthorized guests, pets, and smoking - which are only there as a deterrent.
I can't trust any reviews after this. The major issue is that the review system is flawed. One odd bad review should not affect the overall standing of a business, so even assuming a review was flawed they should leave it on; if they don't, it means that the whole review framework is wrong somehow because statistically gives power where it shouldn't.
So take your money elsewhere.
10 years ago (or more) the "hey, we're getting a neat little off-the-beaten path house experience for a great deal!"... probably was a selling point. Today, abnb/vrbo/etc is just a corporatized juggernaut.
The abuse will continue until prospective victims wisen up. There is A LOT of momentum in Airbnb.
It has convinced a whole generation of travelers to look for Airbnbs before hotels.
Nowadays, whenever I manage to convince my friends to stay at hotels, they are always taken aback by the concept of cheap hotels and how hassle free the whole experience is.
How did Airbnb accomplish this feat?
1) "whole place" rentals are really nice if you're traveling with kids. Like, really nice.
2) It used to often be cheaper to get an apartment or entire house through AirBnB to get any but a bottom-tier hotel (granted, much less true now)
3) It gives you a lot more location flexibility. Ordinary neighborhoods or apartment buildings like a local, maybe walkable to a bunch of cool stuff that's not walkable from where the hotels are in the city, or rural housing sometimes in places where there's not a hotel for many miles.
4) For any kind of getaway where you expect to mostly hang out at/around your accommodations, hotels are so awful I wouldn't consider them an option, short of maybe resorts. Meanwhile you can get a nice AirBnB house on a lake go kayaking right out your backdoor and hang out reading by a wood-burning fireplace and all that. That kind of "the accommodations are the attraction" thing isn't really what hotels are for (again, except, maybe, resorts—but even that's not really the same thing). Granted AirBnB didn't invent this and isn't the only way to get it, but it's one sort of thing for which AirBnB is an option and hotels really aren't.
5) AirBnBs may no longer consistently beat basic hotel rooms on price, but they're still often much cheaper and available in more areas than equivalent apartment-style hotel rooms with kitchenettes and multiple connected rooms and such—these are often limited to long-term hotels, largely near airports and aimed at business travelers, and big expensive suites in fancy hotels in the city center.
Then when I left the review, I get a message a day later that VRBO took down the message. Cool, last time I ever use your service.
With STRs, an investor can pay a significant amount more than a 2nd home investor, whom that 2nd home investor could pay more than a homeowner.
STRs can be a great investment for someone, but it comes at the expense of housing costs in the area.
I love staying in cool AirBnBs, but it's the reality.
Fortunately, AirBnB launched a new product where they revenue-share with apartment landlords where tenants can Airbnb their apartments out. This is a much less distorting to the market, and even can be good for the housing market if the financial community can rely on this extra income.
If more buildings can pencil (due to high construction costs) because there's now a 10% increase in revenue from Airbnb apartment STRs, and lenders/investors are comfortable with this, then that's a good thing.
We gave a two-star review, and it never appeared on the site. Host is still a super host.
AirBnB removed the review and would not say what guideline it’s broken so I couldn’t amend the review.
Maybe even something that verifies the trustworthiness of these reviews?
I haven’t checked but it might be against some rules, but if there is a link to it, it seems possible to have reviews/comments on the contents at that link. I guess Airbnb would be mad about this if it was counter to their interest, so there might be some liability for hosting.
When it comes to dealing with Airbnb it's all about what can be provided as a proof.
I stopped leaving reviews after that and have been avoiding Airbnb.
I don't even think to use them any more.
As someone else pointed out, there are exceptions to this, like Steam reviews, but it's a good default assumption.
One scammy place I stayed had 3 listing for the same place.
Airbnb doesn't treat the hosts great either... They auto set new listings to auto approve...
PERSON: Then, in the morning, we woke to find huge rats scurrying around the bedroom.
LIBERTARIAN: The contract was for a place to sleep, and here you admit receiving that.
PERSON: And it turned out the owner was running a meth lab in the garage.
LIBERTARIAN: What business is it of yours, how the owner uses their property.
PERSON: When we told the owner we were leaving and would be complaining to Airbnb, they brandished a firearm.
LIBERTARIAN: Your stay was over, and you were trespassing. Castle doctrine.
AirBnB then in its infinite wisdom did nothing to help, they are just a platform that gets your money, without any assistance, solution or due diligence, they just get paid but whenever you need something you are on your own, they can put you in touch with any mentally challenged person, and still they would get no responsibility for that. In general it's just this new economy of disruptors that sucks, just pay with no reliability, hope it will be over soon before it spreads too much to segments that still invest in being reliable, before they understand that apparently it's just a cost and people doesn't mind
