An Open Letter to Airbnb The pitchforks are coming
Airbnb needs to do something about its fraud problem--my wife and I rented a place recently in a city ~3 hours away from our house to stay at while our master bathroom is renovated. We&#x27;ve used Airbnb many, many times over the year with no terrible stories (some odd things, but nothing terrible). The pre-arrival stuff with the host went well until about an hour before our arrival--suddenly, a phone call. There&#x27;s a problem with the house, it&#x27;ll be resolved tonight,  so sorry for the inconvenience, please let us put you up in an apartment we just happen to have free instead. A classic Airbnb scam. We did everything right--we immediately said no and reported it to Airbnb. This is where everything fell apart. Airbnb messed up every single interaction and customer service interaction with us. It took 2 weeks to get our $5k back and Airbnb tried to dodge us with constant &#x27;oh we&#x27;ll call you back! only another department can do that!&#x27;. Several of the phone reps indicated that it was a common pattern. We had to threaten to sue before they finally acknowledged the obvious scam was a scam.<p>During this time Airbnb was STILL letting the host (with 40 properties!) continue to rent. We were monitoring the reviews and it was clear that they were scamming people continuously. The reviews were constantly reporting being moved at the last minute to other houses&#x2F;apartments than what the people payed for. In our case we were lucky because we were driving and could just turn around and drive home. Airbnb is riddled with scams and the company is complicit.<p>Learn from our mistakes, skip Airbnb.