They have AirBnB management companies that people can use to rent their places and those are fucking AWFUL.
I will never use AirBnB again. For my friends birthday, he wanted to go to Hawaii. I booked an AirBnB at the hotel he was at. A week before I was scheduled, the management company contact ed me and said the host cancelled, but not to worry, they had an equivalent room nearby!
So I get there, and their equivalent room was across the island over fifteen miles away (it’s Hawaii, so you must travel around the big mountain, not through it). No where near the original. I left and booked at the hotel. I contact AirBnB and their response was “Sucks to be you. We’ll ask them to waive the cleaning fee.” Like ??? Yes, of fucking course you will? I just stepped in. (Narrator voice: “They did not, in fact, waive the fee”) That was it; over $900 down the drain. Should I have validated that the company and I considered “nearby” the same thing? Yes. Should me thinking “nearby” meant the same hotel or a house within walking distance cost me over $900? No.
The idea that these Mom&Pop shops are selling AirBnB isn’t strictly true, and AirBnB is incentivized to bend over backwards and fuck over guests in favor of those middlemen management companies since they represent a large chunk of renters.
Because this really annoyed me recounting this, I actually looked at my email history. They DID NOT refund the ‘cleaning fee’ in full. Instead they offered me $75 off my ‘next adventure’ This is what AirBnB sent me:
Hi me,
This is Monica again the case manager here in Airbnb. I hope this will not be a bother for you.
While I am unable to offer you a full refund for your cleaning fee, under these circumstances, I would like to offer you a coupon of $75, half of the cleaning fee that was not refunded by your host to put towards your next Airbnb adventure as a token of our appreciation and in lieu of a refund.
I have not yet created this coupon, and would kindly ask that you reply to my email to confirm if you would be agreeable to this. As soon as I hear back from you, I will be more than happy to send you a code that will deduct $75 from your next Airbnb reservation!
So, I now post this story on every social media I can find when it reference Air BnB. Fuck them.
Yeah, I tried. The CC said it was in the AirBnB terms and conditions, which I accepted in using the service, so I had to deal with AirBnB.