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Have you ever travelled to a foreign country where you don't speak the language?

You really need to put yourself in the tourist's shoes. If I booked a tour and the host drove me to a different place to stay, that's all I can do. You rely on their ability to communicate, and if they're being kind and doing their best to make your stay comfortable, then that's fantastic.

What you're suggesting is that you're going to start making international calls with some website's support staff while you have luggage on the street, no place to stay, in a foreign city and completely on your own. You're also going to blow off the only person (the host) who cares at all about your situation. Are you kidding me?

I've traveled quite a bit, including to Barcelona. If you speak English (and this person clearly does) then "don't speak the language" is not an issue there, or indeed almost anywhere.

If I book a place for a certain period, then I'm staying for that whole period. If the host suddenly changes their mind and tells me I have to move, no way. I'm contacting the booking agency and having them tell the host to get lost. If the booking agency doesn't help then I'm initiating a chargeback and finding a hotel. At no point is it reasonable to just pack up, hop into a complete stranger's car at their insistence, and be driven off to some place where they won't even tell you where you're going.

Traveling used to be pretty interesting when things went wrong. I got stranded in the Beijing airport once with only a rudimentary command of Mandarin because the airline canceled my flight and never told me, and I had to hunt down an airline employee, borrow a phone so I could contact people, etc. But now? Bring a smartphone and you're a few taps away from communicating with anybody you need. Host is being obstinate? Call AirBnB. Still doesn't work? Book a new place. You make a mistake taking a car with a stranger and he takes you to a place where you don't even know where it is? Open up a maps app and find out where you are. Can't talk to people? Google Translate to the rescue.

You better believe that if the host refuses to honor our agreement and starts trying to jerk me around, I'm going to blow them off and sit with my luggage in the street while I resolve the problem myself. Relying on strangers to fix your problems, when said strangers have already demonstrated that they don't really care about you, is setting yourself up to be a victim.

You place far too much faith in AirBnB's customer service line. I've called it before. I've sat outside the apartment I rented waiting on hold listening to the same 3 damn songs forever (hey did you know the music they've selected is produced by their employees?).

AirBnB wasn't reachable when I needed them the most. Sitting on the curb with my wife and 4yo at 10PM without a place to go. Trying desperately to find any hotel with a vacancy at the height of tourist season in a small tourist town.

That incident has soured my wife on me ever booking a sharing economy rental again.

> AirBnB wasn't reachable when I needed them the most. Sitting on the curb with my wife and 4yo at 10PM without a place to go.

There is literally no way I would trust some random schmo on a site that enables idiots to try to run hotels with the wellbeing of a child, much less a 4 year old. Book a real hotel, honestly. Even if it went well, the bad judgment on display here is slightly disturbing.

I'm not placing any faith in AirBnB. I laid out a chain of actions, one of which is contacting AirBnB, and the next link in the chain is what to do if that doesn't work.

No doubt you can get stuck in a crappy situation here. But you certainly have choices that don't involve doing nothing while your host carts you off to some undisclosed location.

I apologise. When I've retold the story other peoples' responses are simply "contact AirBnB" as if that wasn't the first thing we did. We eventually found a place for the night, resolved the issue with AirBnB (though weeks later), and promised to do a little more forethought into our next rental.

That's OK, and I'm glad you got your housing trouble figured out. AirBnB definitely should be prepared to handle problems like this right away, but I can't say I'm too surprised that they don't.

> "I've traveled quite a bit, including to Barcelona. If you speak English (and this person clearly does) then "don't speak the language" is not an issue there."

I don't know which part of Barcelona have you been but that's just limited (just to do not say untrue). My brother-in-law lives there, and even he (who is native spanish speaker and also speaks English and Catalan) recognize that most locals don't speak English.

> "or indeed almost anywhere"

I know so many places where that is untrue, I would be more cautious if I were you.

> "Open up a maps app and find out where you are. Can't talk to people? Google Translate to the rescue."

You are assuming too many things. Like you have a roaming data plan or even that your carrier have a way to provide you roaming in the place.

> Can't talk to people? Google Translate to the rescue.

Then you are trusting in the interlocutor. You won't be able to tell if they are lying or not.

You don't need most locals to speak English, just a few will do. For tourism-oriented sectors like hotels, English proficiency is not typically hard to find.

I'm not assuming you have a data plan so much as I am saying that you should have one, so that you can handle eventualities such as this. Failing to plan is planning to fail, as they say. Never assume all of your arrangements will work out exactly as they're supposed to. Always have a backup plan, even if it's nothing more specific than "use my smartphone to figure it out."

If you show up in a foreign country with no way to communicate with anybody and no way to make contingency plans then you're making it likely you'll have a bad experience. Don't do that.

If I'm staying in a stranger's house and they tell me to clear out, I would leave immediately. No way I would stay and hope Airbnb tells the host to get it straight. The host can make your life miserable, take your stuff, or worse.

This isn't so much of a "customer desiring a room" as it is a "company desiring a room for its employees."

> Have you ever travelled to a foreign country where you don't speak the language?

Yep. I've dealt with all sorts in random countries where I didn't speak the language. A common tactic of someone trying to rip you off is to say they don't know English and then try to scam more money in the confusion.

> What you're suggesting is that you're going to start making international calls with some website's support staff while you have luggage on the street, no place to stay, in a foreign city and completely on your own.

Um, yeah. Either get a WIFI signal and email AirBnB or call them. At this point I would assume the host is shit and move on letting them know a horrible review is incoming and I will ask for my money back from AirBnB.

Does the situation suck? Absolutely, but don't let it completely derail you. Plans break down all the time, deal with it and move on.

For the record, I have used AirBnb/VRBOs throughout much of Europe without any issue. In places like Hungary and Croatia my trip was enhanced because the hosts were so awesome.

If I booked a tour and the host drove me to a different place to stay, that's all I can do.

Unless you're staying in some remote place, absolutely not! You can and should find some other place to stay unless the whole situation is very well explained. In any major city in the world, there are hotels and motels which speak English and other languages. There are also local guides if you need help making yourself understood.

Just being helpless and allowing the host to take you wherever they want is not safe!

Well, using AirBnb instead of a hotel or similar has this inherent risks... Now, these are the kind of problems those companies have already sorted out.

>You're also going to blow off the only person (the host) who cares at all about your situation.

Are we reading the same article? The host in this situation advertised a room for let, waited until his guests were on site in the city and contacting him to get the key, then yanked the listing. You're accusing the customer of blowing off the host in this hypothetical?

Any given hotel on any given street cares more than that host.

>What you're suggesting is that you're going to start making international calls with some website's support staff while you have luggage on the street, no place to stay, in a foreign city and completely on your own.

Sorry. Imo you're completely dramatizing how hard it is to inform Airbnb of an issue. If you've got either a cell signal or a data connection, the computer in your pocket can take care of this in the time it takes for the host to get to you. You can actually do this with your luggage beside you, and I'd argue that it's a better use of time than driving to an off-the-books apartment that you've never laid eyes on in a completely foreign city. Also, Aribnb provides a local 24/7 phone number in the original confirmation email so you don't have to just rely on the web form.

>Have you ever travelled to a foreign country where you don't speak the language?

Yes I have.

> It seems like it would be a nightmare to sort through a he-said she-said after the fact when the offended party didn't even book a stay (instead the room was booked by some other person that is insisting "no, it's cool, I know them"), and furthermore didn't even report the apartment not being available when the issue occurred.

It's AirBnB's job to do this, sort out these kinds of situations. It's not that hard to come up with a 'nuclear option' to exercise in these situations, where the customer can get a resolution and the host gets a sharp enough slap on the wrist to where it's unprofitable to build a business out of bilking people on AirBnB's platform.

Seems to me that there might be a bit of a leadership vacuum at the company, running AirBnB in as many countries as they're running it in, I imagine not all of the outfits are going to be fully competent. If not even Twitter escalation is solving the problem though, maybe its the executives sleeping at the wheel.

AirBnB can't slap wrists of hosts without very clear proof of their wrongdoing - which wasn't the case here.

In a p2p system like this, it's the bad ratings that need to make this kind of dealings unprofitable.

Oh, that's not true at all. Ebay showed - and the writer of this article realizes - that you can fuck sellers around all day long. AirBNB could implement a "if any customer complains, for any reason, the landlord doesn't get paid" 100% guarantee policy, and the landlords would have to take it.

They not only don't need "very clear proof", they don't need any proof at all.

That does require however, for better or worse, a deliberate decision to operate in that manner. Certainly many eBay sellers, many of whom were doubtless perfectly respectable, became very disillusioned with eBay once they tilted in that direction.

Being that AirBnB is in the customer service field, not really a true marketplace, a customer-centric dispute policy makes total sense. Hosts that can't grasp the concept of "make your customers happy" are only going to hurt the overall AirBnB brand and should be sussed out and expelled quickly.

Oh, I have no disagreement that the default should be to err on the side of keeping customers (renters) happy or at least mitigating unhappiness. At the same time, that doesn't mean that the customer, however unreasonable, is always right. Even hotel chains with great reputations for customer service aren't going to give out refunds like popcorn to every guest who asks for their money back for random trivial reasons. So there's always going to be some judgment involved at the margins especially when the facts are unclear.

The main difference between being in the customer service field rather than a true marketplace is that people are far more likely to complain - reasonably or otherwise - about service than goods they've received. Especially when the customer is used to experiencing (and paying more for) a much higher level of service.

Having very limited accommodation is also damaging to AirBNB's brand.

Well, a really good question is whether or not ABnB is recording all of these claims. If several people file similar complaints even without "proof" a pattern starts to emerge. If they are not recording these complaints, but ignoring them because they can't "prove" anything, then they are being reckless.

I don't really blame the renters here although, in retrospect, they'd obviously have been better doing things differently.

At the same time, in the grand scheme of bad customer service from big Internet companies, Airbnb doesn't look like a huge offender here. Photos from balconies notwithstanding, there is apparently a lot of he-said, she-said to sort through here and it's really hard for an Airbnb (or an eBay etc.) to sort through that. What usually evolves over time (to the dissatisfaction of one side of transactions or another) is policies that strongly default to favor the buyer or the seller.

> Customer contacts AirBnB and the issue is dealt with right then and there, and the host is sanctioned properly.

And customer has nowhere to sleep. During a big conference. In a foreign country.

> Customer contacts AirBnB

According to the article this didn't work. They had to resort to Twitter. Frankly, if their resolution center doesn't provide a phone number that can be used 24/7, than any demand to contact AirBnB with issues is bullshit.

I had similar issues with Uber and their inadequate customer service. If I can't reach someone directly for services like this, they clearly have issues with pleasing their customers.

It does, I spent almost three hours listening to their waiting tunes this summer. Average time in line was about an hour, and if they ask you to call back, you need to wait in queue again.

They already had their money back. At this point, give a bad review and move on with your life. If this is standard operating procedure for this host, he won't last on Airbnb.

> Frankly, if their resolution center doesn't provide a phone number that can be used 24/7, than any demand to contact AirBnB with issues is bullshit.

They're available by phone 24/7, and they provide a local contact number for you in your reservation confirmation email.

Providing a phone number is the easy part. Providing effective service through that number is the expensive part.

Yeah, it's a difficult problem. It's also part of _their core business model_. Like it or not, this post is saying they're incompetent.