After my unfortunate encounter, I emailed airbnb several times to obtain any help possible. This is what they replied me: “as per our Terms of Service, we are not liable for such losses, and are consequently unable to provide any compensation to you in this instance.” There are many reasons they are fully responsible for what have happened, I will only name a few here. Firstly, I wonder how the fake listing can even be listed on the website if it actually does not exist? As a user I have believed airbnb to be a trustable website to browse for holiday accommodation, just like hostelworld, hostelbookers or booking.com. Just like others, I believed that the hosts and the listed accommodation has been thoroughly screened and checked by the company before it was listed to the public. Obviously, the failure to filter out these fake accounts has exposed the users to risks of getting scammed. Secondly, not only that these fraud accommodations were listed, it was suggested by airbnb itself. I received an email from the official airbnb email (discover@airbnb.com) that suggests some accommodations in London. Much to my surprise, the suggested accommodation is the one used for scam. This can only reflects that airbnb holds absolutely no understanding on their listed accommodation. I cannot imagine the risks that airbnb have posed to the users by suggesting an ‘accommodation’ used for fraud. Third, it is still happening every day with a new and different account. After the fraud encounter that I was left helplessly by airbnb, I tried browsing for accommodation again with the same date and location. Similarly, I have contacted the host on airbnb and the same old thing happened again – I received a personal email from the host, provided with a bank account details and bla bla bla. This is obviously a scam. I cannot believe airbnb can just let these scammers to do whatever they want without getting caught, over and over again. This can only reflect airbnb has very poor regulation on their listed host. From the above points, it is enough to ask for compensation from airbnb because it is due to their poor regulation that opens up risks to the customers.
