I hosted a successful apartment in Brooklyn to unanimously good reviews, but because of the constant frustrations dealing with Airbnb finally shut the account down. My apartment is great, but one of the things people always commented on was what a good attentive host I was (good customer service). Wish I could say the same for Airbnb.

I deactivated my account and so obviously stopped getting requests. Then a few months later I started getting requests every day (which is normal when my account is active) For the first few people, I wrote them back and said I’m not sure what is going on, but this is not an active account (no, I had not simply blocked my calendar).

Soon I was frustrated by the constant barrage of requests, but I no longer even have the app on my phone, and had one problem after the next trying to get through to guests on the phone or by text or email: not getting the “code”, getting accidentally cut off, not getting a human, not getting return email. Just one issue after another and I’m busy and feel like they are relying on me to do their work for them.

I let Airbnb know that I have been doing them the courtesy of denying requests, but only for the guest’s sake, and that I am no longer going to continue to do that. They tell me to deactivate my account and I tell them I did that months ago. I requested that a tech person look at the account and tell me how this could have happened. I say that if I deactivate my account, what is to say it won’t suddenly become “active” again, and I’ll have to go through this all over again. They say they are quite literally unable to deactivate my account and that they are going to fine me for the two reservations that have just been auto booked.

I ask them to please scroll through my messages and they will see that I have been trying to make them aware of this problem, and that guests would soon be auto booking, and that I was no longer doing their admin for them and responding to guests on an inactive account.

Finally they refund my “fines” and deactivate my account (after swearing this was impossible many times) when I push for a tech person to please look into what has happened. They have been so capricious, awful, and misinformed, that I was unwilling to deactivate my account for the second time, but they did not back down until I insisted a tech person look into it.

Here is my question though: is it possible that they “accidentally” reactivate well performing accounts in hot markets where they are low on available lodging in hopes that people will just accept the reservations? Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but they have done such shady stuff that I wonder.