Stranded With Young Children At Night In London

I booked a three-bedroom flat in Limehouse Basin on Airbnb about two months in advance of the stay. We were taking the three children to London as their Christmas present to visit Hamleys and do some sightseeing. We were in the taxi on our way to the flat when host suddenly cancelled the booking without warning, claiming the place had been ‘trashed’ by the previous guests. Amazingly this was only discovered at 4:00 in the afternoon. Airbnb did nothing whatsoever to help; they left me on hold for 15 minutes with a fast draining battery and wouldn’t answer messages or ring me back. You can imagine how we felt being stranded in central London, with three children under ten and the best Airbnb could do was offer an extra £30 and a link to the app. Be very very wary booking with Airbnb – their support and help has been non existent. I also discovered I couldn’t leave a review for the host (she has ten properties listed on Airbnb) to warn others.

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

4 Comments

  1. Airbnb could easily fix this problem with strict penalties to the host for cancellations. Stubhub does this to it’s sellers with a 200% penalty to help insure that the tickets sold will be good. It only makes sense. Otherwise ticket sellers could cancel when the market goes higher and resell for more like these piece of shit airbnb hosts are doing.

  2. Not unusual. I also cancelled at a property and it doesn’t show up on the listing that I cancelled. I have no idea why.

  3. Something is strange here. The property you link to has only one owner cancellation listed, and that happened 17 days before arrival…?

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