I received numerous emails from Airbnb when waking up one morning. The first was a booking for a property in Indonesia. The second was a payment failed email. The third was a booking confirmation, and the fourth an email from Airbnb to say that my email address had been changed. It looked like whoever it was had booked a one-night stay for the coming weekend for £785 a night. Following the fourth email, I had emailed account.changes@airbnb.com immediately asking them to take urgent action. I tried to use the Airbnb website but without logging in it was useless; obviously my email had been changed because it said no email address was found when I used my own.

Five hours later, I was still waiting for a response from the account.changes@airbnb.com email address. I also called the UK helpline number, 0203 318 1111, which was unable to help or locate my account (despite having used Airbnb over a year ago now for two bookings) and asked me to email response@airbnb.com which I promptly did. However, I was just sent an automated Airbnb email saying the email had not reached Airbnb. This is completely outrageous! When you try to use their website to find contacts, it just loops you round in circles. Doesn’t it say something about such a big company when they are trying to avoid being contacted by their customers? I am in a catch-22 situation and boiling over at this moment in time, unsure of how I should proceed. If anyone has any advice out there, I would be grateful. It is an obvious statement but following this incident and once it has been resolved, I will never use Airbnb again.