Surprisingly I haven't found a thread with a similar experience to mine, so I wanted to see what the community opinion is on this matter...
We booked a nonrefundable property that advertised as having pool amenities, and had lots of pictures of kids and pool events. The description listed many local attractions, but there were no additional details provided regarding the pool amenity. Only after we were preparing for our trip did we discover that the property does not actually have access to a private pool or even a community pool. When we asked the host, he instead offered free "concierge" pool amenities and listed 4 public pay-to-access pool attractions for us. What this basically meant is that he would organize and pay group discounts for public pool facilities around the city, but only up to $10 access fee and he'd have to coordinate it for us days in advance. These public pools are at least 15min driving distance from the property, so for logistics and other reasons this would be a deal-breaker for us. We requested a refund under AirBnb refund policy, and AirBnb instead sided with the host (sticking to the mantra "our team did not consider that the host violated our listing policies"). The host pretty much advertised other businesses' pools and claimed as his own amenities, and AirBnb felt this is within their policies. We found this unacceptable and proceeded to filing a chargeback dispute with our bank. These events began at least 3 weeks before our check-in date...
We then called those public pool businesses the host provided, and discovered that for the dates of our travel all of those facilities are either closed or not accessible to outside guests. We called AirBnb support and updated them with these facts, as I can't imagine how this would not violate their own refund policies. After days and days of nothing and us following up to request updates on what seems to be a clear-cut violation and refund, their position is that they cannot come to a determination at this point in time. We called our bank back to update them on our new findings...
I'm not sure if AirBnb's position is due to our bank working to get a chargeback or what, but this has been incredibly frustrating and AirBnb seems very unreasonable in their interpretation of their own policy. Clearly the host was making material misrepresentations of the amenities at his property and advertising very misleading promotions. I can't figure out why AirBnb hasn't ruled in our favor and provided us a refund. Any thoughts? Am I just reading the situation wrong?
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