I was sexually harassed and assaulted by a host I found on airbnb. After the main incident, I escaped to my room, but I couldn’t immediately leave the house because it was late at night and I had nowhere to go at that time, so I spent a terrifying night wondering if he would try to assault me again. Airbnb’s response was so confused and shambolic that the story gets quite long, I have written a blog post here to explain in full: becauseiwishtoforget.blogspot.com/2016/02/why-airbnb-is-both-unsafe-and-dishonest.html But the key points are: – Throughout the whole process Airbnb would not keep me informed of what actions they were taking, and when they did, they lied about it! Airbnb twice removed the profile, so that I thought the matter was dealt with, but then they restored it again without informing me (the second time, after they had promised in writing that it had been removed) – Because it was restored this second time without my knowledge, at least 2 other women stayed there without any warning that I had reported this man for sexual harassment! – Airbnb only deleted it eventually more than 2 months after the incident, and only then because I kept contacting them to insist they take action. This prolonged my trauma unnecessarily. – Either Airbnb has no protocol for dealing with these incidents, or their staff are wholly unaware of them. Their whole response was a mess of contradictions. I hope now that the profile has been deleted permanently, but since they promised that and lied about it before, I can’t exactly rely on it. The host’s name is Branko Kozakejevic, the flat is in Belgrade. This man more than twice my age tried to get me to drink more than I wanted and made forceful sexual advances to me while I was a guest in his house. Airbnb didn’t think this was grounds to remove him from their site.
The same exact thing happened to me, at a different place though. They said they flagged the hosts account but that never happened. They just said that to keep me quiet. All Airbnb cares about is making money . They have case workers from over seas who you can barely understand because of the language barrier. I wish we could find other people this has happened to and start a lawsuit. Or go through the media. They actually dropped My Airbnb account to try an silence me, because I kept asking them to pull down their site. Reading what you wrote, I feel like your writing my story because their very similar this should never be happening, it’s against the law and something should be done about it.
This is why there are strict regulations with regards to hotel management. A Professional Association for Hostels need to be there. Even if hostels do cost more, they have strict guidelines that they must follow. What are you going to do if you were fed the host’s bodily fluids because he had a few screws loose? Are there safety procedures in place? Criminal records check? Are they licensed and bonded? Of course 99.9% of hosts wouldn’t do such a thing but I have heard of hosts sharing left over food from other guests and using that to serve the next guest’s meal in Beijing. One place even collected left over pop and they consolidated the old pop into a 2 litre bottle and put it back in the fridge to be resold for 2.5RMB per cup.
So what if he was in his 50’s. The fact you mention his age at all smacks of ageism. He could report you for being ageist. You may have not appreciated him touching you but if he had been 23 you would not have mentioned his age.
Oh Jesus…that’s what you take from this? Of course. To be honest, her mentioning his age is in more of a “shouldn’t you be old enough to know better?” context but sure, his and your feelings about age are way more important than her not being assaulted.
That is the oddest response Julian. Simply warped. No age matters, Ethic both business and social, manners, logic, and more does. This man is a deviant. Downright and outright