Are you kidding me, AirBnB?

Over the summer, my husband and I had sold our home and needed a place to stay while we waited for the escrow to close on our new home. Not only did we need lodging for ourselves, but for our three children. I mean our three dogs. This would prove to be a much more difficult task than one might think.

We could provide references that would attest to our ability to care for a home in our care, with the dogs. I really thought this would not be a difficult process at all. I had thought initially, that the realtors that sold our home, might offer some assistance due to the fact that they have a rental “arm” of their agency. I floated that idea when we were discussing putting our home on the market with them. Of course, at that time they nodded their commitment to help and that was the end of it. When called upon during escrow, they offered no assistance.

I had been tracking rentals myself through various rental applications and was reaching out almost daily to representatives of those rentals, inquiring about a short-term rental with pets. All of those contacted replied that they would not entertain a short-term lease. We even went to look at a couple that I thought we could make work and found to be unsatisfactory. In fact, it is really amazing the condition that people believe is adequate for a rental property.

I had also been looking at Airbnb properties during this time, where finding dates that didn’t have a conflict already was the biggest obstacle, i.e. finding something that had consecutive dates available for the time we needed housing. If that wasn’t an obstacle then having three dogs was the obstacle.

I did finally find a property that seemed to “check all the boxes” and embarked on a dialogue with the host. The unit I was interested in turned out not to be available and I was encouraged by the host to take a look at an alternate unit they had available on that same property. Though it was a bit small, it seemed like it could work.

I got the approval on the dogs, making that unit seem viable. I continued to research other properties but kept coming up empty. Then I was contacted by the host, a couple of weeks out from when we had to be out of the house we sold. Time was really running out, and the host was encouraging me to take the unit before someone else did. Succumbing to the pressure, I filled out the appropriate forms and sent payment for a length of stay that amounted to about twenty-one days, at a cost of about $7,500.

Not the total time we needed covered but felt like we could probably extend our stay in the unit if need be. Also, it was a lot of money, more than we had been paying on our mortgage over a month’s time so I daresay, having little experience with this, I was trying to hold on to my options.

I did feel a sense of relief from the standpoint that it seemed as though our worries were over for this part of the transition we had embarked on and that we had found a safe and secure spot for ourselves and our dogs. So I reached out to the host, within an hour of securing the property, and let them know that we would be requiring two parking passes for our stay, one for each of our cars.

The host sent a message back that we were only allowed one parking space and that it was in the “Rules and Regulations”. What rules and regulations? But, “Okay,” I thought. Our office was not far from this place so I felt like we could make it work by leaving one car parked at the office. That is when the host asked what kind of cars we had. I let them know about our SUV and my sedan. In both cases they said, this will not work. The property has “New York stacked parking” and those vehicles cannot be accommodated, also they said, in the “Rules and Regulations.” Are you kidding? Now I was getting a bit angry. We needed to provide safe passage for our dogs from the parking area to our unit. This property was on a fairly busy street adjacent to the heart of Old Pasadena.

The following day, I received a message from the host that they had received a message from a parking garage representative and that they could accommodate my sedan. They had seen it work in the past. I was not feeling confident about this property or the parking at this point. With an outlay already of about $7500, I felt like there were too many red flags in the less than 24 hours it had been since I had forwarded the funds. So I let them know that we were going to have to cancel our stay, I wanted a refund of our money and I was going to have to keep looking. When I communicated this, the response I got was that I could cancel any time I wanted, but was not eligible for a refund, the reasons for which could be found, you guessed it, in the “Rules and Regulation”.

I figured I could figure this out with a little time, but in the meantime felt that there was no way we were going to stay there and let them know again that we would not be staying there and would continue to seek a refund. Then “crickets”.

A few days before the check-in would have been, they reached out to request we sign their rules and regulations form and to get instructions for entry to the unit. “No,” I said, “we canceled our stay with you’. To which they replied “Kimberly, you can cancel whenever you like, but you have to do it through the app. It’s in the rules and regulations”.

Okay, I had had about enough of them, so I went back into the app, and canceled what should have been canceled by them in the less than 24 hours it took me to find out what I was dealing with and not this. I called the bank because of their unwillingness to refund our money and the bank put the money back in our account. “Done”, I thought.

Several weeks later the bank took the money and gave it back to Airbnb. Are you kidding me? Correspondence with the bank yielded only the conclusion that they were owed the money. It was in the contract. Or at least the representatives I spoke with yielded that conclusion.

By this time we were already a few weeks into staying at the Residence Inn down the street from our office. This was providing a secure and safe environment for ourselves and the dogs, at a price that continues to astonish me. We can leave that for another blog post.

Here, I would like to say that I reached out to many individuals at Airbnb and tried to reach out directly to the host, multiple times over several weeks. All to no avail. There does not appear to be a direct way to lodge a complaint. The situation is very much like the Wizard of Oz. You don’t know who the “man” or “woman” behind the curtain is and you can reach out until you are “blue in the face” and will not get any result in your favor.

At one point Airbnb offered a 20% discount from the host. I said I would accept 80%. They even said they had processed the refund of 20% but we have still not received it. I have tried lodging complaints against that host and that property as well as forty-seven other properties attributed to that host. Still, no progress. And that is where we continue to be today, nowhere with this.

I would love to hear about your experiences with Airbnb, good or bad. Although it would probably take “an act of God” for me to consider using them again.