My daughter and her friend checked into their Airbnb in Barcelona on May 13th, 2017. They went out for the night and came back to find all their valuables gone: two Macbooks, two GoPros, one gold bracelet, and my daughter’s baby blanket that always travels with her. They called the police who came to the apartment. They called Airbnb who told them to go to a hotel, but it was the grand prix that weekend and they had trouble finding one at 2:00 AM. The girls filed a police report and stayed in a hotel for the next four nights because they were afraid to stay in an Airbnb at that point. Airbnb was very supportive at first and offered to help. The apartment host changed his name and picture the next morning for the same place but my daughter could not review on it because they did not stay there. Airbnb has done nothing about that. We have been trying to contact Airbnb for the past nine days. I have called five different times and spoke to five different people all with a promise to call me back about our claims. To this date, nobody has returned my calls. I waited on the phone today for over an hour to talk to a manager and was then finally cut off with no call back (they took my number). When I called again, they would not transfer me to a manager and I had to start all over. I am unable to contact them through the website. I only have a few standard questions but there is nobody to contact. This is pretty frustrating and for such a big company, you would think they would have amazing customer service. Shame on them!
Tag Archives: airbnb troubles
Airbnb Won’t Take Responsibility For Fraud
I was unfortunately the victim of fraud from an Airbnb listing. Yes – I know, I’m stupid – I should have known better. I was new to Airbnb and had no idea that what I was proceeding with was not standard protocol. Ultimately I found a listing on Airbnb with a description that requested I email the provider to make the booking. He then used a very elaborate scheme to make me believe I had returned to Airbnb to submit payment for the listing. Now my money is gone and Airbnb is insisting that because I went outside of the platform I was 100% liable for what had happened. What really crushes me the most is that Airbnb allowed this user to make a listing with a description that gave detailed directions to email them outside of the platform. Airbnb did not properly vet this account and did not ensure that they were posting accurate information. I naively found this listing on Airbnb’s trusted site and thought that because it was posted in the description, it would be ok. After that I was quite foolish and fell for the rest of his scheme. I lost a good amount of money and it is devastating to my family but I’m sure big corporate Airbnb doesn’t care at all what they’ve accomplished; after all, this is pennies to them. The investigative “trust and safety” department issued a resolution with bias and untrue grounds that just so happened to benefit the company. Now they are refusing to speak with me any further and insist that there is no way to communicate with the investigative team. I’m just so thrilled to hear that their own investigation went so well for them without any of my cooperation. My point is that Airbnb did not properly vet this posting and fully allowed the listing to get published with detailed directions that resulted in me being the victim of fraud. They are partly responsible for this incident and refuse to accept that in any capacity. I don’t know what else to do to get their attention but they have been completely uncooperative with me.