Airbnb Decides it’s Okay for Guests to Stay for Free

Posted on September 9, 2019

I was a host with Airbnb for almost three years. I own a beautiful villa on the island of Phuket and I’m not greedy so for a 5-bedroom, 5-bathroom villa. I charge $300 a night, while nearby hotels are charging that for one room per night, so I’m fair.

Airbnb had some people stay at my villa during a violent storm. I warned these people that the Thai weather commission had issued violent weather warnings for the south of Thailand. During the night, around 2:00 AM, the power went out in the south of the island. The guests called me to complain at 2:00 in the morning, I informed them that my power was also out and I could not come over to fix anything.

The following day I called back to be yelled at for all the money to be refunded in full. I informed them that I am not allowed to do an off-site transaction as Airbnb will hold me responsible. I spoke with Airbnb and was told that storms are not my fault and nothing would be held against me.

After these guests complained that the power went out Airbnb canceled my listing and told me that any guests who have booked already will be allowed to stay at my property as I have agreed to do so. I contacted Airbnb to inform them to take their customers and put them where the sun don’t shine. All in all, Airbnb is a rubbish company and needs to change their ways. As you can see, my villa is a complete dump according to this company.

From Bad to Worse at Airbnb House in Mexico

Posted on August 5, 2017

I booked a house near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico last weekend, July 28-30, 2017. Making the reservation was smooth with no problems. When Friday came, the Airbnb app gave me the address where the house was located, and I already contacted the host where I learned he was not the house owner. I told him that we were running late because the traffic was very unforgiving coming from Los Angeles to Mexico. As we arrived at the destination that Airbnb gave me, the house was nowhere to be found. That’s when bad things started happening.

Imagine being in a different country late at night trying to look for a house that you don’t even know. I contacted the host and he told me that my party and I were nowhere close to his place. He gave me directions on how and where to get there. As we arrived at the property, we noticed the house was a great size and looked pretty decent from the outside. As we waited for the caretaker to open the gate, we met the host and were finally invited inside after the gate was opened by the caretaker. The host let us into the house in which had three bedrooms and two studios, which was a good size for my party: five adults, one teen, five kids.

As we went up to the second floor, we found that there was no fridge, no stove, and no microwave. As I continued to have a gut feeling that this stay was just gonna get worse I stayed optimistic and told my wife we should head out to Walmart early in the morning so we could get an electric stove; that’s the only thing we really needed because we brought our own cooler with our food to cook anyway. It was pretty iced up so it should have been good. As the host gave us a better look of the premises we noticed the rooms were average, but the two studios had clear glass walls. They had sliding blinds but they were pretty old, worn out, and raggedy. Then we headed to the roof. It had cement tables and benches. There were guide rails to prevent you from falling but they were unsafe – unstable and wiggling – and one part in which the glass was broken and had been blocked by a broken heater.

The bathrooms were okay. Unfortunately we had women and girls in our party, so that sucked for them because some of the restrooms didn’t have toilet seats. That having been said, we were tired from the drive and traffic. We decided to just sleep it off and had no other choice at that point because it was almost midnight with no Internet to work with. As morning came, we went straight to Walmart, got what we needed, and went back to the house.

As we were eating our breakfast we noticed that some other people were around. We figured they were friends of the caretaker just passing by, bu those people ended up being surfers, because the house is really close by the ocean. I decided to contact the host to check in with him as to ask if there should be other people in the vicinity since the host fully disclosed that the place was all ours. He called me and confirmed the property was ours. No one should have been there besides my party. I let that one go since the surfer guys didn’t take long, they left after a couple hours.

We headed out to do our trip into town, practically stayed out the whole day, and came home almost midnight. We honked and just waited for the caretaker to open the gate for us. Little did we know there was a small party going on and we felt like we were crashing the party. People were on the roof sitting on the ledge drinking, beers were on top of the cars, and there was a radio playing. At once I called the host and I told him that this was happening, so right after I messaged him he called back quickly and asked what was going on. I told him that his caretaker had visitors on the premises, drinking and having a party. People were on the roof and the two other rooms (unoccupied, suppose to be empty and unrented) were being used. I told the host I didn’t want to have a hostile situation so I would let the party go on but I needed it to be finished by midnight. The host agreed, as our kids simultaneously got ready for bed.

As soon as it was time for the adults to get ready for bed the water shut off. Again I contacted the host and his reply was to talk to the caretaker and she would help us out. We were already feeling like outcasts with a party on our own rented house, and now the host wanted me to go and talk to the caretaker, who was having a party. A few moments later I decided to come down to where the caretaker and party was and ask her; to my surprise, she was not in. The lady told me she left not knowing what time she would be coming back. We all decided to rest and use baby wipes just to get through the night. Unfortunately for my cousin, she was in the middle of showering when the water had gone out, so they used bottled water just to rinse off.

I stayed up while my whole party was resting, because people were still on the property, it was already past midnight, and the caretaker was unavailable. Between 3:30-4:00 AM I heard yelling, arguing and threats being yelled, so I walked out and went outside to check up on it, just to learn that it was the caretaker cursing some guys out over dropping little girls off. Mind you, it was 3:00-4:00 AM. The caretaker saw me and so I approached her and asked what was going on with the water. She said it was cut off, and she would know what’s going on in the morning.

I got up around 6:00 AM to see if the water had been fixed. Unsurprisingly, there was still no water, so I went back to the caretaker and knocked; no one answered. I went back abut an hour later and a man answered the door. I asked where the lady caretaker was. He told me she was asleep and asked me how he could help. I asked him what was going on with the water. He said the water was shut off, and they were going to talk to the owner to see what was going on. We decided to get our breakfast going so we could go ahead and do the last part of our trip.

If you think the hell stops there… the electricity shut off. Now the electric stove I brought was all for nothing. They said the circuit breakers shorted out and there was no way to get a quick fix. That’s when my whole party decided to pack it in. We placed all our belongings in the car and just gave our kids a quick walk by the beach. I tried calling and messaging the host but he didn’t reply until later on that day, offering a $100 discount. While I was talking to the host I told him that we ended up leaving the house to get a hotel room so we could get a decent shower, we ended up throwing our food to be cooked away because it was already half spoiled, and we ended up spending more for breakfast and lunch. The whole party ended up spending more, with the intention of saving using Airbnb. This was not even my first time going to Mexico as my wife has family down there.

The sad part is that it was my cousins’ first time coming down there. I called Airbnb and told them what happened. They told me to send a copy of the receipt of the electric stove that I bought and they would reimburse me $200 and the host $250. However, the food wasted, the stress, the hotel we ended up renting to shower in, the unplanned breakfast and lunch… I told Airbnb that it doesn’t even come close to whatever they were reimbursing me. Airbnb got so rude, thinking I was money hungry, which I’m not. I just wanted my party to be given back what they thought was right. The operator was no help either, telling me that the case was already closed and they could not reimburse anyone in my party because they were not listed on the website. I put down ten people as guests and they told me I should have put their names down so they could reimburse them. I’m still waiting on Airbnb to fix this for me.

Nightmare in Nicaragua: Playa Yankee Power Outages

Posted on April 29, 2017

I’d been eyeing this place as a possible vacation spot since I had started planning our trip over a year ago. We had originally intended it to be a ten-day vacation but I splurged and extended it specifically so we could stay here. We stayed at the great Casa Las Mareas in Encanto del Sur, just north of San Juan del Sur. As good as our stay was there, we were excited to come here. I’d had visions of teaching our eldest daughter to swim in the pool here while my wife enjoyed the view with our younger daughter. We got there on a Wednesday. The view heading to the water was spectacular but immediately marred by the sight of the green pool; hornets were swarming in the shallow area as well as some elsewhere in the pool. My daughter was understandably freaked out. I asked Gilberto, the caretaker, about it and he said (translated quote), “It’s an open area, there’s nothing you can do about them”. I thought back to our stay at Casa Las Mareas and its pristine pool, also in an open area. I let the idea of asking him to put out wasp traps slide after I realized I didn’t want to dip my head in a pool that looked like this.

The first time the power went out was before 11:00 PM our very first night. My wife and I woke up within five minutes of one another, sweating and wondering why. The fan, our sole source of ventilation, had turned off. We chalked up this outage to the planned power outage the entire San Juan del Sur area goes through on Thursday, figuring maybe they were getting an early start. We had our girls (three years old, seven months old) with us in bed and sweltered through the rest of the night. The following morning, the power came back on briefly, then went out again after about thirty minutes. We (my wife, our two little girls, my uncle and I) took a day trip and came back to the house. The power stayed on for a little over one hour this time, just enough to give us hope that the power issues were behind us. The power went out again and we settled in for another sweltering night.

I arose before sunrise and walked outside. The houses below (known as Beach House Beauty when it was listed on the market) and Casa Alta both had power. A five-minute walk in the opposite direction revealed Casa Monet had power as did Orquídea del Sur. The next day I spoke to the caretaker at length about the issues. I asked him why we were having power issues if we had a solar power system (after I heard the humming and spotted the batteries and put two and two together). He explained to me that the “solar system” had broken six months ago and the panels had been removed. The main power appears to be inexplicably running through the solar power inverter and more than likely through the batteries, as they were humming.

I asked him if the owner was aware of this and he eventually admitted that the owner was in fact aware of the issue with the power going down constantly. It was on this day, our second-to-last full day of our time here, we were told there was a generator available for us. At this point we still weren’t sure if the power issues would continue. My wife and I thought about the sound of the generator and how it would decimate the sound of the ocean way down below, but at least we’d have power. I asked him to please set it up and he agreed to do so. Ten minutes later I heard an engine start and unfortunately for us it was his motorcycle’s and not the house’s generator. Gilberto took off and I didn’t see him again until the next day. My wife tallied our time without electricity and including a three-hour spurt, we had four hours of power and communications (no cell phone reception at the house, no wifi without electricity).

We ignored the groceries we had purchased and placed in the refrigerator for fear of letting out whatever cold air may have been left and spoiling our perishables (these ended up spoiling anyways). We reluctantly went out to dinner again, an hour roundtrip into town, so my uncle and I could get wifi and communicate with our respective jobs and clients. I grew up in El Salvador both during and after its civil war and it was a rare day that the power didn’t go out. I am well aware of the fragility of the power grid in this part of the world. So you can imagine my frustration when every house in the vicinity had power except for ours. This is a completely preventable issue of which the owner is absolutely aware, according to the caretaker.

The next day, Saturday, the caretaker was there and I asked him again, more urgently, to please set up the generator. We even discussed the best place to situate it. He said, “como usted quiera” (as you wish). Not five minutes later, I heard his motorcycle start and by the time I got out there all I saw was the dust rooster tail that disintegrated before my frustrated eyes. That dust cloud would be the last sign of Gilberto for the duration of our trip. Rather than enjoy our last vacation day, we planned our first of what would turn into three trips into town (down a VERY bumpy long stretch of dirt/rock road). We had to go there because the next day was our last day, and we had to confirm our trip to the Liberia airport in Costa Rica. We had no way of communicating from the house because of the power issues.

We didn’t know when and if or for how long the power would come back so we got ahead of the issue and drove into San Juan del Sur. We were able to message the shuttle company, the rental car pick-up person, and the surf shop from which I’d rented my surfboard to coordinate. We didn’t get to confirm with everyone, so another trip was necessary before our last trip in the evening to ensure nothing had changed for the next day and get dinner (more unnecessary gas and food costs we could have avoided had the owner cared). The power was out when we got back all three times, but came on for about four hours total again. We never saw Gilberto again. We left the keys hanging by the door hoping they’d make it back to him without issues. We never got any guidance on what to do with our trash and spoiled groceries. The shuttle came and we were relieved to be gone.

How terrible does one’s experience have to be when they can’t wait to get home from vacation? We were absolutely blissful at our first rental and are completely angry with the owners and manager for what amounts to fraud. The crystalline pool shown in the Airbnb listings was so inviting and we arrived to a hornet-blanketed science experiment. Lack of power to only this house meant stress for everyone involved. I couldn’t get in touch with work clients until I went into town. My uncle was dealing with an intricate project which he dealt with as best he could with the little time we had power and our too-frequent trips to San Juan del Sur.

This was supposed to be the absolute climax of our trip and it was an absolute nightmare. The pool was unusable (the owner did offer to have it “cleaned” our last afternoon there even though I’d sent him pictures where chemicals and time were clearly needed). Nicaragua is blessed with an almost constant wind thanks to Lake Nicaragua. Many houses are shrewdly built to take advantage of the natural ventilation possibilities. The roof eaves at Casa Pablo were short-sightedly dropped down to cover the ventilation holes throughout the house, including those facing the predominant wind direction. This means you won’t get the natural cooling effect as described above. If you have power issues approaching our massive ones, you will be soaking in sweat at night.

UPDATE: The owner wrote me to say I was lying about the generator. He said Gilberto told him he had hooked it up for us. He told me he had seen the above videos (presumably tipped off when I submitted a review) and he still insisted I was lying. Why would I write to him our second full day of our stay and complain if the generator was going and all was well? Why is there no power in the above videos? Why isn’t there the loud sound generators make in the video?

The listing still up on Airbnb as of this writing.