Tag Archives: airbnb fake review

Ghost Airbnb Hosts and Gaming the System

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I first used Airbnb in 2014 and have used it 15-20 times since with good results most times. As a journalist, I even wrote a favorable article on the subject. However, in last three years I have noticed five troubling trends.

One: ghost hosts. The person or couple pictured is allowing use of their photo and bio by a third party. On a trip to Florida, a young woman was ghosting for her elderly grandparents who spoke broken English and did not know how to host. In Tennessee, a woman switched her listings to hide bad reviews. Also in Tennessee, a young couple with young children fronted for several properties in an apartment building and resented being contacted by phone for instructions to get into the place.

Two: Fake reviews. In Montana, a host buried a bad review that carefully and credibly listed problems under several one sentence reviews that looked fake. Tip-off in Tennessee: overuse of the word “amazing” in reviews of the host. The Airbnb rating scale is badly designed. “Met expectations”, for example, could be very good, but is only three stars.

Three: Increasingly impersonal. The founding principle was person to person. Now that is rare. Four: Customer service is awful. Impersonal, manufactured, and ignores constructive thoughtful critics. Five: Pricing is deceptive. Cleaning fees of $50 to $75 or more added to a list price of, say, $48, which can change as suddenly as airline ticket fares.

Airbnb Doesn’t Care About Basic Cleanliness

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I booked a room in LA for three months. It was probably not the best move, but I didn’t know anyone in LA and I actually thought it would be safer to use Airbnb. When I finally got there, I thought it was the dirtiest place I had ever seen. I can only assume that the host and his flatmate used used all the old furniture they had to furnish the so-called guest room. There was one shaky secretary, one chair whose height adjustment no longer worked, an old drawer, and one old bed. This bed was quite a sight: its stage was broken, so the host decided to put one mattress on top of the other in order to compensate for that. The mattress on the top looked and felt like a rescue from an underfunded dog shelter: it was quite possibly older than myself (30) and it sank in when I’d lie on it to sleep. Quite soon I had a lot of back pain.

The room itself was filthy beyond belief. It seemed to have never been cleaned for over a year. I vacuumed the carpet the first morning I spent there, and I cleaned the secretary, the windows, and the drawer. Everything was dusty and stained. The sheets also did not seem to be recently cleaned. The rest of the house wasn’t much better: the furniture was far newer and more appropriate, but it was equally dirty. It boggles my mind: do these people actually think it’s normal to live like this? There was an unpleasant smell in the house. The kitchen had mold. The floor was sticky due to the accumulated filth.

I left the house after one week (as soon as I found another room). I asked for a refund, which, as expected, the little scammer that calls himself a host refused to pay. So I got Airbnb involved. What did they do? Nothing. Zero. After two weeks they still hadn’t responded to my claim. I had to call them, after spending an hour searching for their number on the internet (it’s nowhere on their website, which is indicative of their whole attitude). When they finally said something, it amounted to nothing.

“The host is unwilling to negotiate a refund.” Oh, really? Who would have guessed?

So how much did I lose? $2000, thanks to the host’s strict cancellation policy (which has already been struck down by a court in South Korea). The host then went on to double book the room. In addition, some of the reviews on his posting were fake. How do I know this? I had seen one of his flatmate’s friends when I was there, the first morning. He left a review on the posting two weeks after I left, raving about how awesome the host was.

You Charge a Cleaning Fee? For What?

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To whom it may concern: this location, though convenient to LAX, was the worst Airbnb property at which I have ever stayed. I have stayed in eight other Airbnb locations this year, and all have received good reviews. I normally don’t leave bad reviews, but the public needs to be warned. This place is that bad. The first thing that hits you is the smell when you walk in. Being that is a very old and dirty apartment, it’s not surprising there is mold growing everywhere and an unidentified slime coming out of the wall. The carpet is filthy, there is miscellaneous junk sitting along the edges of the wall in different rooms, and when you start looking around you begin to notice all the places the walls have been patched. The ceilings of both bathrooms and inside the cabinet over the kitchen sink have mold growing, literally hanging down like moss on a tree in the rainforest. The handles on the refrigerator have been ripped off and are on top of the refrigerator along with 1/4 inch of filth.

The cabinet above the kitchen sink is like something out of a horror movie. In the cabinet above the stove is more filth and a sticky trap with a dead cockroach and cricket. The ceiling in the top of the cabinet looks to have been finished by a drunk auto-body man who got a volume discount on Bondo. In the cabinet under the counter top stove are 220V wires just wire nutted together. This place has so many health and safety violations it should be condemned. The three bedrooms were sparsely furnished with cheap $5 pictures from Walmart but the worst part is the linens. For the room in which I slept (rather fitfully), the queen size bed had a king size fitted sheet, no top sheet, and a comforter that appeared threadbare and very old. The room at the front of the house was so bad that the person assigned to sleep in that room opted to sleep on the couch. All the vertical blinds had missing slats and did not allow for privacy from the neighbors. If we had not gotten into town so late we would have gone somewhere else. I think the part that makes me so angry is that I was charged and I am assuming previous occupants were also charged a cleaning fee. I have to believe that all the recent reviews that say the place is clean are fake. Unless you are okay living in filth do not book this dive.