Air BnB host stole from me and my sister?!

Amit53
Level 1
Scotland, United Kingdom

Air BnB host stole from me and my sister?!

First of all,  I want to start of by saying (despite the title of the thread) I don’t know for sure that the host definitely stole from us, but the evidence points to it, and even if they haven’t, the fact is, somebody did steal from our apartment.

 

so myself,  my sister and our friend recently stayed in France and hired an apartment for around 5 days. Everything seemed fine - (other than the fact that it said there would be a/c and there was just a standalone unit and a few fans. )

 

The host did at one point send his “friend” someone he had been putting me in contact before, saying he could help us with hiring cars, a boat or any of the more “exclusive” services. I politely declined as it wasn’t in our budget. He came in to get hold of a pram, he seemed to have trouble getting hold of it, but checked each room and eventually found it, then went on his way. This was probably at around 11am on our last full day in France. We left the apartment shortly after 12 that day and locked up as usual. 

 

however, things took a turn for the worse. On returning that day (probably around 8pm) we discovered we had 2 pairs of shoes missing. That in itself was alarming but bear in mind these were very rare designer shoes, worth several hundred pounds in total.

 

All 3 of us went through the apartment, re checked and double checked. We then phoned the host and asked if anyone had entered the apartment recently. We were told no, and after explaining the situation he said that it was “impossible” and “nobody could have gone in and taken anything because only he had the key”. 

He said he would come over to the apartment  to help us look. Even more strange, there was absolutely no sign of forced entry, damage to the door, locks, windows or anything else. In my opinion, the only way the thief could have got in was either having a key, or knowing how to get past an extremely strong, heavy door with a multi point lock system. 

 

shortly after arriving, we tried to explain that it was 100% missing, and that someone must have stolen them. And We were not mistaken.

His behaviour became strange and very dismissive - going between saying “maybe extra-terrestrials  took them!” , to “I don’t know sometimes people make stuff up to get money from the host” to things which weren’t even relevant like “you used too many towels, my cleaner will take a long time to wash them”. Essentially he just didn’t believe anyone could take them (as apparently “only he has keys” and it is “impossible to copy that type of key”). He then phoned both his friend and the cleaner and put them on speakerphone and asked if they have keys for the apartment. (We asked he spoke in English as we cannot speak good French.  The phone call for the cleaner was very cagey and confused though, but he brushed it off as her bad English skills. While his friends conversation (actually started off in French and he started off with “I know you didn’t do anything”).... you get the idea. 

 

my sister became very upset, as her shoes were a graduation gift from my mum and she went downstairs to get a food order.  But on returning, she was apologising saying that in the rush, she actually dropped the apartment keys down a gap inside the lift. Meaning we had no keys for the apartment. Our host immediately became angry and started shouting saying “she threw the keys!”. We apologised but said at the end of the day, we had property stolen and that also needs to be sorted. I offered a solution of getting the maintenance team to access the inside of elevator shaft (on inspecting it we saw it fell down a very deep hole down to the bottom of the elevator shaft). However, he wouldn’t budge and just said “it’s not possible”. The discussion then descended into an argument and we could see that he was not going to solve the situation. Neither was he interested in acknowledging that there was a theft, or even helping us file a police report, or even helping us get the keys.

 

So he shortly left the flat and before that said “we should talk to Airbnb, they make millions anyway” or something along those lines. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant though.

 

so anyway, we were left in the apartment with no keys (so we couldn’t all leave without being locked out) and were left unsafe as someone had already accessed the flat a few hours earlier to steal from it.

 

i tried to contact French police to report the theft , however, since it was so late, they were going to entertain me at that time, since it’s not an emergency. The station had someone there, ( albeit I couldn’t communicate that well with them as they couldn’t speak English) and was told to come back at 9am the next morning. This wouldn’t work though since my flight was at 10am and we can’t afford to miss it. 

 

So in the meantime, I actually took it upon myself to find a lift engineer. I found something written on the lift, phoned up, who could get an engineer (took him an hour to turn up) if we paid then 200 euros!- he did get the keys out of the elevator shaft for us! And I let the host know about this. 

 

So fast forward to the next morning (I think we managed maybe 2 hours sleep) , the host didn’t even turn up to help us check out (even though he did say he would previously). We were told to leave the keys in the apartment and take a picture of them.

 

So we left France with a seriously bitter taste in our mouths. A bad experience in what was otherwise a good holiday...

 

sorry for the long rant, but what I’m trying to say is , I have requested the value of the goods, and obviously this will go to the host, but what’s next? How likely is it that it’ll go our way? 

 

 

 

 

3 Replies 3
Louise231
Level 10
Manchester, United Kingdom

@Amit53

 

In all honesty i don't see what airbnb is going to be able to do without a police report.

 

It's the same if you wanted to claim from your holiday insurance for any loss/theft, you would need a police report.

Amit53
Level 1
Scotland, United Kingdom

But since we couldn’t stay in France long enough to file it, there’s no leniency? The only option I can think of is I fly back into France to file a police report.... 

.

Hi @Amit53 ,

 

how much are the shoes and how much is the ticket for the flight?