BEWARE OF AIRBNB!!

This is a warning and a true story of what happened to me when I rented a house using the Airbnb service.

I had a project in the USA and I rented a house using Airbnb. I found a nice 2 year old 2 bed room + garage house with a reasonable price of 105€/night. I made the deal with the house owner using Airbnb from August to December, 2015.  In November I found out that my project would last longer than the original move out date in December.  I agreed with the house owner that I would stay at the house until January 26th, 2016. Airbnb sent me an offer stating that I could continue renting the house until January 26, 2016 at the same price of 105€/night. I accepted the offer and everything was OK. Middle of January I found out that my project would not be finished earlier than February 8th, 2016. I ask the house owner if it was possible for me to stay at the house until February 8th, 2016.  The house owner said that it was OK and Airbnb sent me a new offer for the additional 13 days of renting. I was busy with my project and also very stupid and accepted the offer without checking the offer carefully.  Afterwards I noticed that the rental price had risen from 105€ to 137€. It was OK for me that the rental price increased for the last 13 days, but it is not OK that the rental price ALSO increased for the PAST 165 days from August 8th 2015 to January 26th 2016 considering I had already paid! I sent a message to the house owner to see if it was possible to correct that mistake. The house owner said that Airbnb refused to correct the mistake. I called Airbnb and the guy on the phone said that according the Airbnb policy, if the customer accepts the price it cannot be corrected by airbnb anymore.  The Airbnb agent asked me to contact the house owner to ask if I could get money back. Why didn’t Airbnb want to help a customer with this kind of obvious problem?  Instead they asked me to directly contact to the house owner… is it because Airbnb wanted to keep their additional fees?  I think so! I talked with the house owner and he agreed that I had paid $5,940 USD too much and he understood why I would like to get my money back. The house owner said that Airbnb had already taken their fee, so he could only return $4,339 USD!  I made the deal with house owner and received the $4,339 USD refund for the mistake, but I still had to pay $1,601 USD extra because Airbnb would not refund their fees!

Don’t be as stupid as I was and never accept any Airbnb offer before you have read it very carefully. My personal advice is to never ever use Airbnb’s services because the company policy is not to correct an obvious mistake if it means giving up any of their booking fees!  Please share this warning with all of your friends so nobody else will have the same problem I had.