Airbnb Tried to Evict us the Night before my Husband’s Funeral

I rented an Airbnb for myself and my adult children. The purpose of our trip was a memorial service for my husband/their father. He had passed away unexpectedly three weeks ago. We checked into the Airbnb on Friday, March 16th with my son’s trained service dog. Shortly after we arrived, the host started texting me about Levi (my son’s dog). I have saved all the texts, ugly messages calling me an indecent person for not disclosing ahead of time that my son had a service dog.

She was rude and demanded documentation, which I provided, even though that was out of line and she had no right to ask for it. We remained in the Airbnb Friday night. On Saturday, my daughter and one of my sons went out to do errands related to my husband’s memorial, which was to take place on Sunday, March 18th. My son remained at home with Levi (my son is 25 years old).

Shortly after we returned to the Airbnb, I had a call from Airbnb telling me that they were concerned about the situation, they had a call from the Airbnb host saying that Levi had been left at the home alone (he was never alone, not even for a second). I told her that he had never been left alone, my disabled son stayed at the house with him. The Airbnb “specialist” said that she would send me of list of alternate places that we could move to.

At this juncture, my husband’s memorial was less than 18 hours away, and we had dinner cooking already. We are reasonable folks, though, and looked at the other properties they sent us. There was only one property in close enough proximity to the memorial service; the rest were anywhere from an hour to two hours away. The property they suggested we move to was $3800 per night, and we were expected to pay it.

That was not possible; the $650 per night we were paying for where we were staying was already too much to spend. My husband had just died, and he was the sole provider. When we told Airbnb that was too much money, they said to both my daughter and myself “Well, I can give you an hour.”

I said, “An hour to what?”

And she replied, “An hour to get out!”

They were going to forcibly remove us from the Airbnb, myself and my kids and my son’s service dog. I became hysterical. Where would we go? We couldn’t even pack in an hour. My daughter is an attorney and was able to get on the phone with the owner of the house. I’m not sure how she did it but she convinced her to let us stay. Thank God. But the scary thing for me is that Airbnb was going to put all of us out on the street because of my son’s dog. It’s very scary that Airbnb has the power to evict a family who did nothing wrong.