Here is my unpleasant story from 2 weeks ago when I was in Bali.
I had booked an apartment but the host was not replying to any of my messages/sms/calls. Fearing something was fishy I opened an Airbnb support ticket 3 days before my the checkin date. In those 3 days Airbnb support did not reply to me at all. It was a shitty feeling, I wanted to book another place but I had already paid for this one.
1 day before checkin, the host replied with a short message that I could checkin next day, he didn't address any of my questions nor any of my follow-up messages. Next day I go to the specified address of the villa and call the host, the host picks up this time but tells me that the address on Airbnb is wrong and sends me to another location. I go to the second location, the building does not look anything like the one in the photos, there is nobody there and I cannot get inside, the neighbour shouts that the building is empty because the lease contract has expired a month ago. it starts raining and I am standing there on the street with all my baggage and it starts to rain. I call the host, now really angry and he starts apologising that he is not even the landlord but just a guy from another country (India) and he does not know much about the booked property then he stops responding.
At this point I submit to the reality that this listing is some sort of scam and start looking for ways to contact Airbnb over phone to get urgent help since I have nowhere to go.
The Airbnb website is useless, cannot find any phone numbers to call. Finally I google and read on some forum, that there is no phone number for Airbnb in Indonesia and that I need to make a call to a US number. I make the call and they are very helpful. They tell me they will try to contact the host in the next 30 minutes and that I should look for other suitable listings. After 30 minutes they contact me again and they agree to cancel my previous booking so that I can book something else. I end up booking something which was is in the same price range but much lower standard (not much choice when doing same-day booking).
I talked to Airbnb support for 7 minutes in total and that cost me 28 EUR. Airbnb later agreed to refund me the 28 EUR for the phone calls.
After this experiece I am more keen on using booking.com again, have not had any such bad experience with them yet.
I had booked an apartment but the host was not replying to any of my messages/sms/calls. Fearing something was fishy I opened an Airbnb support ticket 3 days before my the checkin date. In those 3 days Airbnb support did not reply to me at all. It was a shitty feeling, I wanted to book another place but I had already paid for this one.
1 day before checkin, the host replied with a short message that I could checkin next day, he didn't address any of my questions nor any of my follow-up messages. Next day I go to the specified address of the villa and call the host, the host picks up this time but tells me that the address on Airbnb is wrong and sends me to another location. I go to the second location, the building does not look anything like the one in the photos, there is nobody there and I cannot get inside, the neighbour shouts that the building is empty because the lease contract has expired a month ago. it starts raining and I am standing there on the street with all my baggage and it starts to rain. I call the host, now really angry and he starts apologising that he is not even the landlord but just a guy from another country (India) and he does not know much about the booked property then he stops responding.
At this point I submit to the reality that this listing is some sort of scam and start looking for ways to contact Airbnb over phone to get urgent help since I have nowhere to go.
The Airbnb website is useless, cannot find any phone numbers to call. Finally I google and read on some forum, that there is no phone number for Airbnb in Indonesia and that I need to make a call to a US number. I make the call and they are very helpful. They tell me they will try to contact the host in the next 30 minutes and that I should look for other suitable listings. After 30 minutes they contact me again and they agree to cancel my previous booking so that I can book something else. I end up booking something which was is in the same price range but much lower standard (not much choice when doing same-day booking).
I talked to Airbnb support for 7 minutes in total and that cost me 28 EUR. Airbnb later agreed to refund me the 28 EUR for the phone calls.
After this experiece I am more keen on using booking.com again, have not had any such bad experience with them yet.