Anyone have experience/success for Airbnb to refund part of your stay due to a ghosted booking/check in nightmare? Here's what happened. My family (2 adults/2 kids/1 dog) booked an Airbnb a few months back for 3 weeks in the DC area starting June 17th. At the time the host was relatively new but had a few good reviews so we went with it. He was responsive to our questions even up to a few days prior to the check in. However, the morning of check in, he didn't send check in instructions... we reached out a few times and the check in time (2pm) came and went and no response. Contacted Airbnb. They said they would try to contact him and if he didn't respond in an hour they would help us get into a new place. That hour comes and goes and the agent says to find a new place and she would send us a coupon code to book it. She explicitly said any difference in price would be covered (recorded call) and she initiated the refund for the cancelled/ghosted stay. We find a place and send it thru the messaging app but then never hear back. We contacted Airbnb support again, explain the whole situation again, and we were promised a call back within the next hour. This nonsense continues for the next 6 hours while each Airbnb customer service person tells us something different about Aircover and the level of available support. And of course, since we booked our place months in advance and for 3 weeks in the DC area ... finding something suitable and comparable was next to impossible. One representative texted us few listings but then himself acknowledged that these were not suitable because it did not accept dogs, or didn't have parking, etc. … . By then it's 10:30pm, dark in the strange city neighborhood, and we decide to just get a hotel for the night and sort it out in the morning. The next day the only thing we were able to find on Airbnb was almost $2500 more expensive for the entire 3 week stay. You can imagine that it is not easy to find something equivalent for 3 weeks in the DC area the morning of! Also, we come to find out now that the original host has several bad reviews citing the same ghosting behavior in May and June (we booked in April). Why didn't Airbnb shut him down or warn us? His properties are still up there available for booking! Anyway, we are asking that Airbnb covers the difference between the 1st and 2nd place, about $2500 unfortunatelly. So far they are only willing to cover the cost of the hotel for the one night ($145).
During my years of using Airbnb, I have had 2 hosts cancel on me few weeks before my travel and I have never bothered Airbnb and solved my own travel problems even if that meant I had to pay extra. This is the first time I am asking Airbnb for help since we traveled across the continent with kids and a dog, got stranded in the middle of the night in a strange city and needed to find a replacement for 3 weeks. Airbnb has this specific business model (strangers renting homes to strangers) and to make customers feel safe, Airbnb promises to provide a safety net. It is disheartening to find out that actually Airbnb safety feels like a scam now. Pretty much any reputable hospitality business would be able to accommodate customers in extenuating circumstances, even if that meant extra costs to them. But the Aircover support team, which so far was solely based in some Indian call center, is just running off of a script, told us different information every time we spoke to different rep, and simply doesn’t have the authority to actually creatively solve problems in extenuating circumstances. Just literarily reading similar script with different aircover facts. If for nothing else but business sense, if Airbnb would cover our extra cost (due to their negligence of keeping a host that ghosted multiple customers), they would make that extra cost back in short time by me staying on this platform and continuing to use their services. Given this experience and if this doesn't get resolved, I am not using Airbnb again. Welcome other platforms and competition. Just sharing here and will also file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau for what it is worth.
