Airbnb

First off it takes forever for Airbnb support to get back in touch with you. I dealt with a place INFESTED WITH SPIDERS! And it took DAYS to deal with customer service for a solution. They then wanted proof and I sent a pic of one spider and they said it was NOT ENOUGH EVIDENCE! Then I sent 4 pics of 4 different spiders and THEH CLOSED MY CASE WITHOUT A RESOLUTION! A hotel would NEVER make a guest prove an infestation to change rooms!!!!! And they wanted me to talk to the host about it like I want to confront someone about their spider infestation in Their home! Thats not my place! I paid hundreds of dollars to be comfortable! I literally slept with all the lights on to deter more spiders and slept with a towel over my eyes to block the light!!! I also dealt with an issue where I wanted to stay in a place for 2 weeks but needed one night to not be there since I was working in a town for one day an hour away. I didn’t want to pay the “arbitrary” service and cleaning fees just because I needed one night away which could add up to be over a hundred dollars. Their support said I could not so this and that I had to make 2 separate bookings and pay the fees twice!!!!!!! What!!! Hotels don’t do that! Hotels don’t charge you those arbitrary fees either! This whole company is just horrible! And I travel 100% of the time so they will be missing out on $2400 a month from this guy here!!

I had the worst experience ever! Every year my family makes plans to go out of town to celebrate Christmas, this year we decided Orlando, FL. I heard about AirBnb and decided to check it out. I reserved a house for December 27-January 2 and reserved it on August. I get a text a week before the trip saying the host canceled the reservation. The host didn’t let me know the reason and just canceled. I try contacting the host and he didn’t respond to my calls and text. I call customer service and they tell me it was an emergency and that my money is going to be refunded in 5 to 10 business days. They didn’t give me an explanation at all. I decided to get another house that was $1000 more, but I was ok with it since I had everything paid for and family from another country was coming. 2 days before the trip I get a cancellation message again about my reservation on the new place. This host was decent enough to tell me that he canceled due to the days I reserved for were already booked. Apparently Airbnb showed available rooms that were not really available. Called customer service and they didn’t give me any solutions, just sent me listings of places that were already not available or $5000 more in price. Give me a $200 coupon like that was any help at all. I’m never using this app again and I recommend you do the same.

So I signed up and attempted to book for the first time about a year later. In the mean time I had canceled the credit card I signed up with. So I attempted to book but it failed because of the credit card. I got an email, a text and a message through the app telling me it failed. I clicked the link in the email which opened the app but there was no indication of how or where to update the credit card. I finally found it, not in account settings, but (strangely) on the page of the failed booking. There was no option to remove a payment method nor to update a credit card. However there was a button to add a new payment method except the feature would not load. I just got the white page and the little animated dots. I tried restarting the app, restarting the phone, updating the app, and tried it on WiFi and cellular all over the course of about 12 hours. Nothing worked. So I logged into the website. There I found an option to delete a payment method but incredibly there was no option I could find to add a payment method. So I contacted customer service. The replied to my message at 4AM the next day but gave me no helpful information. I replied, but didn’t hear back from them for three more days. By then I had already booked with a normal hotel which, of course, was no problem. Good riddance Airbnb.

Something is wrong with the search engine airbnb uses. I put in a City and great, there's like 800 places to pick from. Problem is that most of these locations are 30 minutes away from where I actually want to be. As a traveler, this is mostly inconvenient. So then you have to waste your time checking through each posting to see which one is actually close to where you want to be. Please add a distance filter from the city center to fix this mess. Other room finding applications know how to manage distance, so airbnb is way behind. Aside from that, either the posting is falsified by the host or the engine is misreading metadata, but some city locations at the top, don't match what is on the map. I feel like this must be the host lying about the location to try and get people to go to their location, but airbnb should just pull the city location from the map. If it does already, then it's broken. Lastly, an enhancement request to the usability. Since I travel to the same place many times, I'm looking at the same locations a lot. Of course I have my favorites, but I'd like an opposite list of locations to avoid. Maybe I read a bad review or the neighborhood was not to my preference, then I don't want to have to figure that out each time I run a search.

I am very disappointed with Airbnb. We had an ant problem in our house, and when I tried to resolve it with the host, she turned on me and blamed us. She said she went above and beyond and that is just not true. Since we didn't think to "document" the ants, Airbnb took the hosts' side of the conversation. That is so wrong and has made me never want to use Airbnb again. While the host insulted me as a person and said I was too demanding and minimized what actually happened, Airbnb was no better. They said they had to side with her because I had no pictures. I am sorry but who thinks to take a photo when your hand is covered in ants, and you are just trying to make sure they aren't all over everything you own, which for the record they were. They were in the bed, on my retainer, glasses, clothing, etc. It was one of the most disgusting things I have had to clean. Yes, that's right, we had to clean it because the owner didn't believe in taking a more drastic measure to clean then Windex. Airbnb's customer service was no good either. They made it seem like they empathized with me when they called to hear more information and that they were so sorry, yet they did nothing to rectify the situation. I will never stay with them again. Beware, if anything happens - DOCUMENT IT ALL, otherwise your words mean nothing.