My experience has been an absolute nightmare and I have no idea how to get it resolved as the multiple customer service agents have been unhelpful and blatently lied, then deleted my account. I had to set up a new account just to be able to reach out for help in this forum.
I booked a reservation through AirBnB approximately 2-3 weeks ago. Was not contacted by a host as the website indicates I would be. The website offers an option to split the payment in half or pay in full. I chose to split in half as I would have more money in my account as we got closer to the reservation date. Approximately a week after I booked, I received an email from my bank that AirBnB was trying to pull the second half of the money out that account. Had I known it was going to be that soon to the booking, I would have just booked the full amount on another card. None the less, I removed that credit card from my AirBnB profile and replaced it with another card that had the funds on it. I followed up with a call (after doing a LOT of searching for a way to contact AirBnB... the website is not user friendly) and "chatted" on line with someone who absolutely could not find my reservation! She said she would have someone call me. A few ours later someone that could hardly speak English called me and said her name was Ana. We discussed the situation. I told her the new card was on my Profile Account and she needed to pull the remaining half from that card. She assured me they would get it corrected and would send me an email confirming our conversation. She sent an email but it had my name completely misspelled and the body of the email was so garbled that it did not make any sense. Needless to say, nothing was updated. They continued to try to pull the money out of the original account from a credit card that was removed. I continue to try to chat with someone letting them know they were pulling from the wrong account. In the meantime, I kept trying to reach the Host as the website had a link for me to contact her. But that was non existent. When clicking on the link, I received an error message. Reaching the Host directly was impossible. The only way I managed to get in touch with her was to try to book again (but had to put in a false booking date as my actual booking take was taken and I could not click on it) and send her a message. She finally saw that message and realized there was an issue. She must have then contacted AirBnB for my contact information as she called me to let me know she had been sending me messages. However, when going to my Profile Account, there were no messages. I explained the situation to her but she says she has nothing to do with the billing, that all goes through AirBnB. This was a week ago. A week later followed up with her a text message letting her know that we were excited to be there next week for our Anniversary and that AirBnB still had not pulled the second half of the payment out of my account. She responded back with "you need to contact AirBnB because they told me YOU have cancelled your reservation". I finally found a phone number on the website after a tremendous amount of searching to call to get this resolved and when I spoke to a gentlemen (I did not get his name), he informed me that there were two accounts for me, that thier system created a duplicate account with my email address being similar. Clearly there is something wrong with the AirBnB system. On one account, it had the original booking and the other account had the correct credit card information. I have no idea how their system duplicated an account for me, but it is clearly an AirBnB issue. The gentleman indicated he would look into the issue and call me back. I later followed up with another phone call and got someone else on the phone as you cannot get back in touch with the original person. Had to explain the whole situation all over again to someone else. That makes three people now. Eventually a fourth person called me back as I was driving home from work. He claimed he was going to help me rebook since it was cancelled. I informed him AirBnB needs to refund me the money they took out of my account in full as this was their error. I DID NOT CANCEL THE RESERVATION!!!!! This is not my issue to resolve, it is AirBnB's. He further said he would need the Host to approve the refund. I dont give a flip how he does it, but it needs to be resolved. The solution was very simple... they needed to take the other half of the payment out of the credit card I had placed on my Profile Account or just refund me my money and I'd go somewhere else to book a reservation. He said he was going to call me back the next day at 3:00 pm to get this resolved and after waiting hours in front of my computer with my phone, he did not call. I went on the Website to take a photo of the conversation I had with Ana as proof in case I needed to fight this and my account has been deleted. They wiped it out! In this forum, I read other conversations where someone posted emails of what they identify as owners. I've emailed them but have not heard anything as of yet. I did speak to the Host again via text message as she and I have kept in contact. She said she talked to AirBnB and they told her they've tryed reaching out to me. This is a blatent lie. They have not and they deleted my original account so there is no more proof of the conversations we were having. To date, they are not taking responsibility for thier error. They owe me a full refund for "their system" cancelling my reservation without cause. The Host has not been helpful in trying to get it resolved. Her responses have been mostly "reach out to AirBnB". Well if that were working, I wouldnt need to contact her. Sadly, if it were my home AirBnB were representing, I would want to know of the horrible customer service and do everything humanly possible to get the situation resolved.
