Let me start off my saying I am not usually a complainer. I like to think of myself as someone who goes with the flow. However, a week into my three-month long stay at an Airbnb in Honolulu, I found myself turning into someone who wants to raise hell.
I woke up with lots of tiny red, itchy dots on my arms. I thought maybe I had gotten bitten during my run in the park the previous day. I waited a day or two but they only got worse. Around this time I also started noticing tiny black specks on my sheets and pillows. I did some investigating and found out that these could be bed bug fecal stains (gross, right).
I contacted my host who told me to go to the doctor and see what they said about my bites. I went to the urgent care down the street to pay $40 to have some idiot look at my arms for five seconds and told me it was a rash. I knew it wasn’t a rash at this point because I have sensitive skin and get rashes quite frequently. This is when I decided to try and contact Airbnb, and subsequently put myself through customer service hell.
I contacted Airbnb about this bedbug problem on March 2. It is currently March 11 and I am sitting in a hotel, still with no answer about this problem. The first person assigned to my case was the most unresponsive customer service agent I have ever experienced. He would take hours, sometimes even days to respond, with only vague responses.
I called a few days later requesting a new case agent and was told that someone was already working on my case. I called almost 3-4 times a day for the next few days until someone said they could take over my case. They told me that he was supposed to have transferred my case to a new agent after his shift was over, but instead left it to be handled by no one.
It’s now been a week of me getting bitten every single night. My physical and mental health are both plummeting. I have bites on my arms, hands, back, and even my face. On March 10, I finally found two bed bugs. Up until now I was getting bitten and saw stains but couldn’t see the actual bugs. An exterminator, who I had to call, came later that night and was able to confirm that it was bed bugs.
Mind you, this is a long term rental from Feb. 15 – May 15. My friend and I are currently without somewhere to stay for about another two months. Airbnb has constantly changed what they said they will reimburse and has refused to tell us if they will put us somewhere new. They won’t even tell us how much of a refund we will be getting.
I honestly don’t even want to stay at another Airbnb because of how they have treated us but I guess that would be better than living out of our car. I can never get in touch with the person actually working my case and whenever I call they say that they’ll tell the case manager to call me back. Have they ever actually called me back? You guessed it, nope. This has been ongoing for almost two weeks at this point with no end in sight. Airbnb hell indeed.
Sub-standard accommodations. Lies and evasions from Airbnb and host when challenged. Nightmare customer assistance. Theft of customer’s payment. Airbnb in a nutshell.