Misleading or Cheating by airbnb!

[Angkana0]

Sharing the same frustrations with some of you.....Below is the letter I write to airbnb..

I am writing to express a sincere disappointment of how things run in airbnb.  We live in Singapore and my sister's family live in Texas.  After so many years we have planned to meet up in California.  And after months long of planning, we finally booked the 7-day apartment for 7 of us in LA (booking with Matt - **).  We were supposed to check in on 23rd Dec.  In the morning when I checked my mail, there was a mail came between 1 or 2 am! telling us there was a cancellation from the host.  We were shocked as another family has landed in the morning and would learn that after months long of planning, we had to look for a place in a very short time.  While I was trying to communicate with airbnb, in panic, my brother-in-law booked another place (**) as we had 3 children with us.  That was the background... To put into points...

1.  We were trying to get the compensation of USD261 for the booking (**) to compensate my brother-in-law booking, but we were told that that could not be done as it was different account.

2.  The airbnb staff advised that my brother-in-law shall cancel his booking and I re-booked.  The host of ** did not entertain that and she said there would a cancellation fee.  By the time we came to this point it was in the late afternoon.  If things did not work out, we would be left stranded. So we decided to go ahead with my brother-in-law booking because of the reason on point #3 too.

3.  With last minute notice, there was no place that could accommodate 7 days.  If there was, the review were not good, some were far beyond our budget.  So we had the first 5 nights covered.

4.  I booked another 2 nights (**).  It showed in the website that I would only pay USD262 as the compensation of USD251 was reflected in the website (attached screenshot).  But after we were charged, it was the full amount of USD.  The staff explained that because our amount was lesser than the original amount we booked.

5.  I could not accept that explanation.  The point was if that was the case, the screenshot should not reflect the compensation as it was clear that the money booking for 2 nights was lesser than the original amount.  So what does it mean to mislead the guest?

I understand there are many cases happened in a day, but there should be some flexibility to assist the guests.  

a)This was the last minute cancellation, the day before the host, Matt (**), still communicated with us.  He did not allow pet, if we were to know earlier, we could have brought our dog with as we could not find someone to take care of him.  

b) We wasted our time to try to look for the accommodation instead of spending our holiday in the States after 19 hours of flight from Singapore.  

c) We explained that the refund will cost us to lose another USD80-100 from the currency exchange charged by the bank as we paid in Singapore dollar, but the refund is done in USD.  

d) At the end of the trip, the family could not spend time together after months long of planning!

e) This case caused me to learn more about the airbnb organisation of how guest ignorance the organization has towards the guests.  The staff send us link for the help, of which it did not help at all.  The search for more information in the internet let us see more and more guests are frustrated with airbnb and how the organization itself goes around.

But all explanations went down to drain.  There was no compensation or assistance.  Like many frustrations shared by the guests in the internet, we felt the same.  Though our cases are different, but our feelings are the same... frustrations. This is the reason my other family members always tell me that other booking companies are more straightforward, but I never believe and I always had good experiences of all the countries we have benign travelling to.  So the last 2 nights in LA, my brother-in-law decided to book with Booking.com and we sticked to airbnb.  And this was the result of our action. And we feel we were cheated by airbnb!

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