My wife and I chose Airbnb to find a location to have our wedding reception. The first day was very busy getting people from the airport, getting and putting up decorations, helping the caterer, and so on. Given that, we noticed but disregarded the broken refrigerator and dirty house and other odds and ends. We took a couple of pictures but carried on getting things done.
The week went by, and we head home. My wife received a message from the owner saying that we damaged many things and needed to pay $300 in repairs. She messaged her back calmly saying that these things were already broken and sent the pictures timedated to her as proof.
She said that her management service is very thorough and accused my wife of lying. She became very hostile when my wife pointed out all the other things that were substandard with a $3000 house rental. She insisted that we were lying and gave my wife a very negative review saying, “It would have been nice for you to be honest about it.”
Now she is publicly calling my wife disrespectful and a liar when we have the proof of her management company’s negligence. To add insult to injury they have deleted my wife’s review of the house while the owner is still allowed to publicly bash and harass us online and on her personal email.
My takeaway here is you stuffed 10 kids into a New York City apt.
Not sure if this was your first time using Airbnb, a lot of guests who are familiar with the process know how crucial it is to *immediately* notify Airbnb customer service if there are issues upon arriving. If this is your first time I definitely can see why you wouldn’t find telling them right away very important, but unfortunately with the reputation Airbnb is getting, it’s crucial to be on top of things and have good communication with host and CS if issues arise. CS is very cut and dry. They look at it like you did not mention a broken fridge (which is pretty important to use during your stay) and try to side with the most reasonable or “believable” account of what actually happened. Hope things worked out in your favour. Usually if they don’t find a solution they will pay out the host for the damages anyway (the guests usually don’t know this). Again all depending on the circumstances.