Tag Archives: airbnb mice

Airbnb Doesn’t Care About Mice, Apparently

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My child and I were supposed to stay June 21-22 at this Airbnb property for  a bit over $1100, the price of a 5-star hotel. The first night we woke up at 4:00 AM from mice crawling on us. My child screamed and threw a mouse on the floor from his bedsheets. Mice in Colorado carry the deadly Hantavirus.

We packed immediately and left. While I was putting the luggage in the car a mouse jumped out of my suitcase and landed on the ground. I was able to take a picture of it. When we  got to an area where there was cell phone coverage I contacted the owner. She started screaming at me that I was crazy and that there were no mice. She expressed no concern about our safety and well being.

I cancelled our reservation online and sent an email to Airbnb. I called them immediately and stayed on hold for several hours without them answering. I tried to call them for the next several days as well to no avail. We slept in a hotel. The host refused to give me any kind of refund.

After a month I complained to the Better Business Bureau and finally Airbnb replied. They pretended to the take the matter seriously and looked at the mouse picture and the receipt from the hotel . They said that the host did not want to issue a refund and there was nothing they could do. They sent me $50 back out of the $1500 that I paid, a “refund of the cleaning fee.”

I asked them if this meant I had to stay with my child at the Airbnb property with mice crawling on us and they said we had to leave but they would not issue any refund.

Where’s Airbnb’s Policy with a Mouse in the Caravan?

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We went for a family holiday and business trip to North Wales. I was taking part in a Welsh Culture Festival selling fashion. We decided to stay in a caravan about 30 minutes from the festival. It was a little old and gave us the basic requirements we needed but the reviews looked good so it was a done deal. My mother is also disabled so we needed somewhere she didn’t have to walk upstairs.

When we got there, the first impressions were okay, but the more you sat in the dingy caravan the more you discovered. Firstly, I got an Airbnb message from the host on my phone. I tried to text her back but it would only let me communicate through the website. I did, then the host texted me directly. This is where I know we went wrong.

All of the correspondence between us and the host was via text. The first thing she told me was her cesspit would be emptied the day after our arrival. We would have to sit in her garden with years’ worth of poo being emptied before us. The cesspit was also uncomfortably close to the caravan. We booked the caravan months in advance so she could have booked this at any other time but didn’t.

I soon discovered that there was no wifi, even though it said on the listing that there was. She then said she would contact her son who was “profoundly deaf and might be working”, one of her many excuses, like “I think I just need to put my hotspot on.” Let me get this straight: you’re advertising wifi to your guests using a hotspot on your phone in the house next door to the caravan?

At this point we didn’t even know if she was in the house or in another country so we could have been using a hotspot in England for all we knew. May I add she was also painfully slow at responding to our messages, leaving at least 30 minutes between each one.

Already disappointed, we tried our best to keep our spirits up, even after walking in on the pungent smell in the small bedroom, and cobwebs all over the place. As it got dark I turned the lights on and you could see that the carpet hadn’t been cleaned at all. I found plaster on the floor, and bugs stuck in the ceiling light.

Then something moved in the corner of my eye. All three of us looked at each other… what was that? “A moth,” I thought.

“A spider,” my dad thought.

My mum knew: a mouse. It ran under a small cabinet. I crept down on the floor to have a look and saw. Sat next to a leaf in the shadows was the mouse, frozen in sight staring right at me. My mum and I went to sit back on the sofa with our legs up, then we saw him scutter out from under the cabinet and into the kitchen area. We think he went into the kitchen cabinets then, either to hide in some kind of nest or through a hole out of the caravan as we couldn’t see him after that. He was cute but I’m sorry, unwelcome.

We complained about the situation to the host and asked if it could be sorted that night. We would have been willing to stay, maybe, if she would have been willing to do something about the situation. We waited an hour with no response. When we finally got a response she claimed she had lived there for 30 years and had never seen a mouse; she was gobsmacked.

She then tried to blame it on the farmer next door, asking if it was a field mouse as he had been doing the fields and then some girl that did the changeover might have let it in? Then she said, “Could you not just pick it up and throw it out?” Excuse me?

In the time she spent ignoring our messages, we managed to pull back the sofa and saw mouse droppings scattered everywhere. On closer inspection I found more in the dining area, and a few in the bathroom. This wasn’t a lone mouse that wandered in, it was a recurring problem. After seeing it scurry into the kitchen cupboards we knew it could potentially contaminate our food.

It got really late. We were running out of time to find back up accommodation, so we left and told her we wanted a full refund. She was “apologetic” but not really, still sticking to the same script.

We decided to go straight to Airbnb that night with all the photos we took and screenshots of the messages taken. Then at 1:00 AM she sent a paragraph of a text demanding to know why we said such horrible lies about her caravan. She had no problem responding then. She claimed she went to the caravan but we had already left, so she magically made an appearance late at night, stating that the caravan was spotless. She stays in five-star hotels and it was immaculately clean apparently.

As we drove past her house it was clear that it was dirty; in the conservatory there were piles of boxes and bin bags stacked on top of each other. The entrance of the house was full of beat up old cars and more trash.

Airbnb did nothing. We had pictures of the mouse droppings, dust and uncleanliness, and insects in the caravan and provided all of the screenshots. We were told “we can’t use text messages as evidence as they can be doctored.”

We couldn’t receive our money back as she claimed we didn’t tell her about any of the issues so they’ve taken her word for it and I have now lost £580 for a 10-night stay + about £1000 for last-minute accommodation for the week. All they did was offer a coupon for our next stay, and after bickering with them for a bit they retracted this coupon anyway.

I haven’t added the listing, and haven’t written a review yet as we are taking legal action and trying to get our money back via PayPal. She has some bad reviews on her profile concerning the cleanliness but they’re mainly good. I went to check recently and saw that she suddenly had loads of new reviews for July. Strange… either she had so many guests before us and couldn’t clean or they’re doctored in some way. Airbnb is more than happy to leave a rodent-infested listing on their website, so their policies have no legs.

Mice Infestation and Airbnb Host’s Response

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Our recent family trip was the worst Airbnb experience ever. Our trip was originally suppose to be for nine nights and we ended up leaving early due to mice. We didn’t discover the mice until our fifth night. On our fifth night at the cabin my mom slept on the pull out couch and woke up to one mouse on her leg, and another one near her head. The mattress topper for the sofa bed was all chewed up by the mice and soiled in mouse droppings. We immediately called the host in the morning to inform him about the mice. We then discovered mouse droppings all around the house. The mice droppings were in cupboards, on the kitchen counter, floors, and the toaster.

We have two young children (3.5 years old and 16 months) who were playing and crawling on the ground. I was constantly stressed and on high alert cleaning the floors because of the mice. The host responded by giving us a bottle of wine and referred to it as a “token gesture”… more like a slap in the face to us. He also set mouse traps. Airbnb asked us if we would let the host try to resolve the issue but what the host did by giving us a bottle of wine and setting a few mouse traps was anything but a solution.

The next morning my two children were watching TV on the couch and we discovered a mouse trap was missing from where the host had originally placed it. We discovered the mouse trap between the sofa arm and cushion with the mouse stuck in it… and alive. We sent a photo to the host and told him that we were leaving because there was clearly a mice infestation and it wasn’t be solved nor was it going to get solved. As the guests we should not have to stay in an accommodation that has an issue with mice, and it was wrong for the host to think he tried everything he could and refuse to issue us a refund.

How is this customer service? How the hell is he a Superhost? I am so upset that our family vacation was turned completely upside down especially because we booked it all the way back in February 2018. What’s worse is Airbnb failed to respond, and the customer service was so poor. I have to repeat my story again and again because whoever is on the phone doesn’t have authority to resolve it, and when they say they will call me back they never do. It’s a nightmare that doesn’t end with the trip – it’s ongoing and I will make sure I tell my friends my experience because I will not be using Airbnb again.

Multiple Infestations of Bugs and Mice at Airbnb

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The first (and last) time I traveled using Airbnb I got to my first cabin and it looked beautiful. However, when I went to have a shower, the water smelled so bad of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide) that I couldn’t put my head under the water in the shower. For two days I avoided showering because of the nausea the smell caused. The next morning there were mouse feces all over the buns in the cupboard, the dishes, and the outside of the fridge… hello Hantavirus. That same night mosquitoes snuck in through the cracks at the top of the door.

On to the next Airbnb. On the second day of our stay, I was sweeping and found what looked like live and dead cockroaches, some larva, and many many spiders (both dead and alive in five different places in the rental unit). When I contacted Airbnb they asked for pictures, which I sent. They claimed the pictures were not enough evidence and refused to help me. I then called a health inspector who wrote a report which included building deficiencies. Airbnb does not require inspections to ensure building codes are safe or health inspections. This is the first and last Airbnb experience for me.