Tag Archives: airbnb no contact

Airbnb Customer Support Reneged on their Promise

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I am looking for a lawyer to represent me on a contingent basis to litigate against Airbnb. Can someone help me please? Please see the chronology of my situation last night.

I tried to establish a connection with my Airbnb host last night at 9:15 PM; the host’s phone was unreachable, but I tried calling multiple times over a 15-minute period. After that I called the Airbnb helpdesk number; they also tried the host unsuccessfully. Airbnb support transferred me to a “case manager”. This person tried to arrange an Airbnb or hotel for me but could not find anything as it was already 10:00 PM.

The Airbnb case manager specifically instructed me that I could go ahead and get a hotel at my own expense and Airbnb would reimburse me for the full amount (this call was recorded, I was told). The case manager also confirmed that I would get an email with a link and instructions.

My wife and I tried online to find available rooms in a 10-mile vicinity of the host’s property. Only the last hotel (a Ritz) confirmed they had one open room available for $850 + taxes. I walked to the hotel and got into the hotel room at 11:00 PM, then received a very strange email from Airbnb support that I would get a refund of the $100 Airbnb booking and an additional $10, which obviously made me very aggravated and disturbed.

I called Airbnb support. A representative spoke to me and apologized for the confusion. He reconfirmed that I would be reimbursed for the hotel that I had to book. I got an email confirming the same as what he told me on the phone, then I got a call from the same case manager as before. He was very impolite and suggested that I misheard him in the prior call. He was not aware of the other rep’s conversation with me and his email. He was clearly flustered as if he was being reprimanded.

The last call with the case manager left me very disturbed and I could not sleep all night. I have aggravated blood pressure and I lost one full day of meetings for ill health. Airbnb is not responding to my messages.

Airbnb Induced Stress Keeps Guests from Enjoying Paris

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I booked an Airbnb for four of us (two couples) in Paris and, having used the platform before, it seemed easy. We were confirmed in a “Charmant appartement spacieux”, and we thought all was well, until about two weeks before we were to travel when I tried to contact the host to find out where we would get the key, etc. I tried every method available for a week, and all communication, both to Airbnb and to the host (if there is such a person) disappeared into a black hole. Panic and anxiety followed as I envisaged four seniors sleeping on the streets of Paris. On careful reading of the reviews (which I should have done before) it appears no one has actually stayed with this host, and three have had the same experience as I had.

I eventually cancelled, because I believe the post is dodgy in some way, and we couldn’t arrive in Paris with no confirmed lodging. However, now Airbnb has kept the $110 cancellation fee, which it should not do, as I don’t think there ever was a genuine product/service for sale, but I can’t find any way to present this argument. All emails funnel you into drop down lists that are not appropriate for this case, and none allow for genuine contact. They keep saying “contact the host” but that was the problem. It’s back to proper hotels for all of us.

Airbnb Hell is an Understatement with Payment Issues

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I have just begun hosting on Airbnb. I had my first guest for two days a few weeks back and everything went great: the money that was owed to me was put into my PayPal within a few days. I have now had guests in my home for the past two weeks staying for a month and I have spent the last week ringing Airbnb at least four times a day and sending loads of emails trying to get payment. They keep making excuses and I never get to talk to any manager. It has been the biggest nightmare for me and I have no idea where I go from here. I had bills to pay last week that the money I was to receive was to cover and I’m still waiting. I am even considering asking the guest to leave my home because otherwise they would have a month staying in my home using the heating, electricity, wifi, etc and I have no money to cover these bills. If anyone has any suggestions to help me out I would greatly appreciate it as I am at my wit’s end with this crowd.

The Airbnb Customer is Not Always Right

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What a joke; I thought the customer was always right. Not in this case. I brought issues to a host’s attention about his place and the lack of help from his helper. Well, you thought I had accused him of fraud or something worse. Never had he heard this before, claiming he only had “happy customers”… just some of the responses he was giving me. He then went on to respond online about this, stating that I was impolite and rude to his assistant. If asking for someone to show their face and meet the customer to make sure everything is okay (finding where to go, making sure the room is suitable to enter, finding all the necessary items needed – towels, water, facilities to eat) then we must of been the rudest people ever.

The Airbnb response was even better, stating that we had been put on the “not providing a quality customer” category. Needless to say, we will not be using Airbnb again and certainly will not be using this whole building again, let alone this host. After reading some of the responses here, I know our situation is not that severe, but when you pay a decent amount of money to have a good holiday only to be treated like we had done something criminal it has an affect on you. I do feel better knowing we are not the only ones but feel sorry for those who have been put through this as well. Thank you for listening to my winge.

Neither Host nor Guest Wants Cancellation Fees

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I guess Airbnb did not design customer service with service in mind. I made a reservation for a month in Satellite Beach, Florida for winter 2019. Only by giving them my money could I then get the exact location of the condo and contact information for the host. Since I was already staying in Florida this winter I drove to the rental location the next day. It was not to my liking so I contacted the host, who was very nice, and cancelled the reservation on Airbnb.

The site told me to contact the host and have her cancel the reservation or I would lose over $3000. I asked the host to cancel my reservation. She told me that the site instructed her to have me cancel the reservation, otherwise they would charge her a cancellation fee. Neither of us wants to incur charges for a reservation that was only three days old for dates almost a year in the future. What an outrage. I sent a message to customer service, who promised to contact me within 24 hours. I plan to try the phone number you have published on this site to see if I have any better success.

Airbnb Charged my PayPal Account for a Fake Reservation

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Late last night I had a notification from PayPal saying I had been charged £450 for an Airbnb. I looked at my emails and had three emails that stated:

1. Confirming a reservation I had never made
2. My receipt from PayPal
3. Airbnb confirming the reservation had been cancelled and due to the host’s policy I wasn’t eligible for a refund.

Airbnb said to use the resolution centre for extenuating circumstances (which was impossible as my account was later cancelled). In the next 2-3 minutes I was also sent a billing receipt email from Airbnb, an email asking for payment verification details, and then finally an email saying my account had been cancelled (in which it implies it wasn’t cancelled by Airbnb, but rather, had been cancelled by the ‘user’).

At this point, any attempts to log into my account failed (as it was cancelled) which means I had no way to access my account details, or to access the resolution centre previously mentioned, and no way to contact customer service since every help or “contact us” page seems to just link to a “log in for help” button. I am astounded at this – surely if you have a cancelled account you should have the means to be able to contact Airbnb to resolve problems? Apparently not.

I then had to Google a contact number for Airbnb. Why they couldn’t have just put that in their emails is anyone’s guess. I called customer service. There was no answer at all; I was on hold for 30 minutes. I then sent a Twitter message to Airbnb help, advising them of the problem. They didn’t reply until four hours later, and even then, only to ask for my email address. It has now been 12 hours since I messaged them and the only progress made is just messages from them asking for my account information or reservation information – no real action, no offer to call me, no information on a phone number I can call for more help, and certainly not sorting out the issue fast enough given the amount of money involved.

I spoke to my bank who said that I need to go via PayPal first, and if they don’t refund the money then I could come back to the bank who would then try to help. I raised a dispute via PayPal last night, and this morning called their limitations team to ask for more information and to get a fast resolution as it was a lot of money. To be fair to PayPal, the customer service agent was very helpful and was able to confirm during the call that my case was closed in my favour. They have now refunded the full amount back to my account.

It turns out that Airbnb was able to charge my PayPal account because they were set up as a subscription on PayPal for automatic payments, something I was not aware of and something not made especially clear on their website. Given that someone else had a very similar problem only three days ago this is obviously not a one-off instance. Someone is accessing accounts without permission – both guests and hosts – in order to steal money. Something needs to be done about this, as it is fraud.

Add to the List of Reasons Why Airbnb Sucks

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This isn’t a very exciting story, but add it to the list of complaints about this rotten company. Here is a letter that I wrote to Airbnb this morning:

I made a reservation this morning for a trip with Airbnb. I have been an Airbnb customer for a long time, and a host for almost as long. I was looking for properties that were not Instant Book, and thought I had submitted a request to just such a place. My request was approved before I expected though, just as I was in the process of booking a different place and cancelling the first request. I cannot cancel this new reservation myself without incurring fees.

I called customer service and of course due to your famously abysmal customer service, the rep couldn’t help me, and couldn’t even tell me when a representative might be able to help me. This is a problem that needs to be fixed immediately; it just can’t wait a day or two for a rep to get back in touch with me. Now I am in effect stuck with a reservation that I don’t want, and this host is stuck with a bunch of guests who are very unhappy to be heading to his place. This is a horrible situation for everyone.

My point is that as with anything related to travel, like airline tickets or hotel rooms, there must be a penalty-free grace period after a booking in which to cancel. Even if it is just a few hours, like it is with most airlines. I would suggest that you add this to your service. I must say though that even if you do add this grace period, it will be too late for me.

I have been increasingly unhappy with Airbnb for a couple of years now, it’s very clear that you prioritize your profit over the experience or safety of your hosts and guests, and while I appreciate the fine human exchanges that sometimes come with hosting and guesting with Airbnb, what I now appreciate are the nice people hosting and guesting despite the rotten treatment we all get from your company. I am at an end with you. But first I have to go stay in this house that I paid for and do not want.

Bounced Between Customer Service and Trust and Safety

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I’m in the U.S. and have a local co-host who manages the bookings for my house in Belize. Things have always gone smoothly with other booking sites. Then I signed up with Airbnb. They deactivated my co-host’s account. I’m not sure why. I think it may be because they sent her a verification code to my number in the U.S. and she didn’t receive it.

We have tried endlessly to get her re-activated. They told us she needs to call the U.S. office directly. She has racked up a hefty bill being put on hold. Calls from Belize are expensive. Then they told us they would send her an email with a link to a site to activate her account. That didn’t work. Since her account is deactivated there is a hold on my account too so I can’t respond to requests for bookings; they just expire.

Each time I call (after a lengthy stretch on hold) I get a different story, or I get cut off. I have spent hours on the phone. Customer service doesn’t have access to records of calls, and can’t do much. They bounce everything up to a department called Trust and Safety. They can’t be reached directly and only share limited information with customer service. The last person I talked to said I should just remove my co-host then I could do the bookings myself. This is not what I want.

In addition to lost bookings, there is a safety issue. There was just an emergency email from an arriving guest which my co-host couldn’t access. Fortunately I received it and was able to get the guest’s direct email from Airbnb so I could get her in contact with my co-host. The next suggestion from customer service was that I “snooze” my listing at times when I am not able to manage it. Why can’t they just work on re-activating my co-host? Why can’t I communicate with Trust and Safety?

Answering Simple Question Leads to Terrible Customer Service

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Over the past eleven days I have been trying to resolve – with absolutely appalling assistance from customer service representatives – a rather minor issue with my Airbnb account. To briefly summarize: I did in fact qualify for Superhost status across all metrics for the last quarterly review. However, there seemed to be an issue with the ‘Review Rate’ metric – which was showing me as having received six reviews across thirteen bookings (for a review rate beneath the 50% threshold).

I had completed a booking from December 24th-30th (which was included as part of the thirteen bookings), and the guest had left me a review on January 1st (which I was told is the ‘cutoff date’). When you factor in that review (which should be included), you can see that I actually had seven reviews across thirteen bookings, which would have bumped my review rate up to 54%, thus qualifying me for Superhost status.

Since I first brought up this issue with Airbnb, I have spent in excess of three hours on the phone speaking with various representatives, on top of the time I spent engaging in email exchanges with case managers/supervisors. Again, I understand these things might take time to resolve, and I have been extremely reasonable about that. What I find utterly unacceptable is being told to expect a callback by the end of the day or the next day and then never hearing anything. This has happened to me five times over the past eleven days.

I have to keep wasting more of my time calling Airbnb and retelling my story just to get an update, only to be be told that the representative I am speaking with has no power to do anything, and that the supervisors are always (conveniently) ‘in a meeting’. Yesterday I went through the exact same process two more times (being told to expect a call back the next day), and as of 3:00 PM EST, I still have not received a phone call or any email notifying me of anything. Absolutely nothing.

I like Airbnb, and I was fully intending to use the platform as a host and a traveler repeatedly over the years. Whenever friends and family brought up the topic of Airbnb, I always spoke highly of it. I am a relatively new host, but the guests we have hosted overwhelmingly praise our hospitality. I was looking forward to continue delivering that experience well into the future.

Unfortunately, dealing with Airbnb customer service over the past eleven days has made me wonder: “If this is how they handle relatively basic issues, how would they handle a serious issue like a guest who causes damage to our home?”

When I spoke with the customer service representative yesterday, I told him that if I did not receive a call back today I would pull both of my listings and stop hosting. I would also stop using Airbnb as a traveler, and would refrain from praising the brand to friends, family, and anyone else I encountered. That would be a real shame, but I need to draw the line at a certain point. If Airbnb doesn’t respect their hosts enough to even have the decency to communicate with them then why the hell would I willingly keep doing business with this company?