Airbnb Gift Certificates are a Scam, Plain and Simple

What a great idea, I thought: give my son and his wife an Airbnb gift certificate for a weekend getaway for Christmas (they have two preschool boys… need I say more?) and some cash to spend wildly. I chose Amazon as my gift card producer, paid my money, got the certificate to print off, and gave it to them for Christmas.

It was only recently that they tried to use it and the nightmare began. First, my son lost the paper and asked me to find out what the code was to access the money. I spent almost all day trying to get this information. Airbnb blamed Amazon and Amazon initially blamed Airbnb. Amazon then sent me proof that I had paid for the thing, plus we had the credit card receipt to prove we had paid.

I scanned and emailed all of this to Airbnb. They basically told me that it was not sufficient and I had to tell my credit card company to refund my money because “it did not go through”… except I did get a code to access the money. Basically, they said they could not issue a new code. Then my son found the code and tried to access it. He was told that it was invalid by Airbnb.

He made numerous calls with no success. I finally contacted Amazon again, very angry about the difficulties and that they should sever their ties with Airbnb. They decided to refund the money to me with no strings attached. You rock, Amazon! You suck, Airbnb!

I will never use Airbnb again. They were uncooperative, rude, unwilling to do anything in the face of evidence that I had purchased the card, and generally absolving themselves of all responsibility. This felt like a scam. You give me your money and I will keep your money because you have no recourse. Do not book with Airbnb.

Posted in Airbnb Guest Stories and tagged , , , , , .

5 Comments

  1. Nate, Tom and Brian…. But then they found it and the code still didn’t work so what are your replies to that then??

  2. I didn’t lose mine and I had all the info. It still didn’t work. This person is correct. They don’t intend for people to use the gift cards and they make it as hard as possible for them to do so.

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