I have a daughter who is busy attending a two-week, summer camp in Bristol. We needed a place for her and mum (my wife) to stay for 12 nights. My daughter would be joined by her friend and the two mums decided that they would each look after the girls for 6 nights; taking turns to do so.
My wife booked an AirBnB apartment under her own name, even though she would be staying there for the second part of the stay. The day before the booking commenced, the host - Philip - contacted her and asked for the names of the people arriving. When my wife gave only the names of the girls and the 'other' mum, Philip accused my mum of acting as a third party booker and said that the three would be refused entry to the property on arrival, even though my wife would be joining the two girls six days later.
At the time, we were not aware that the person making the booking had to arrive on the day, so we apologised to Philip and asked if we could find a resolution to the problem. He wrote back to us in the AirBnB message thread and said that, if we cancelled the original booking and the rebooked the dates under the name of the first mum, he'd accept the second booking and issue us a full refund for the first... We took him at his word and duly cancelled, receiving a 50% refund on the booking. But when we then went to rebook the same dates, later that same evening, some of the dates were blocked out and we couldn't rebook. We tried again the following morning and now panicking (as we were due to arrive at the propoerty that night), called Philip to find out what was going on. He was incredibly rude to us; saying he didn't want us at the property afterall and promptly put the phone down and blocked all attempts at further communication..
We then contacted AirBnB who claimed that as it was us who had cancelled the reservation, it was up to the host to decide if they wanted to offer us a full refund or not. They spoke to Philip on several occasions but apparently, despite his written assurances, he chose not to fully refund us and simply decided to keep £540 of our money. AirBnB did offer us a refund of their booking fees, which I sense was something of an admission on their part but they keep hiding behind their T&C's and are refusing to escalate our complaint. We feel that we've been defrauded by a host who has used a technicality to his exclusive benefit and we have no means of recourse.
I wish I knew how to make this right. We did everything that was asked of us and ended up being cheated. It feels so wrong...
