We organised a trip to Singapore to surprise a dear friend and booked an Airbnb for four people which apparently had 400 positive reviews. When we arrived, we were greeted by a friendly Filipino lady. She explained to us that there is another guest staying so we just need to keep our volume down (fair enough). The aircon was also leaking. Not long after, we heard loud noises of someone seemingly playing video games coming from the living room. We ignored that, though we were told to be respectful and keep our volume down.
While waiting for our last remaining friend to arrive, we were getting ready to head out. One of our friends then came over to the apartment to wait for us while we are getting ready. The person who was playing video games earlier started to go berserk after seeing our friend appearing in the apartment (we had booked for four but there were only three of us in the apartment at the time of our friend’s arrival). Although we tried to explain to her over and over that our friend is not staying overnight, but just here to wait for us to get ready and go out, she went ballistic and shouted: “Get out of my house! Get out now!”
We only found out she was the host after this whole incident (we always thought she was just another guest staying in the place). So the person who insisted she didn’t want any noise in her place was shouting at the top of her lungs. The nice Filipino lady was actually not the host (we suspected she was the housekeeper made to do business for her by the way the host talked to her). We didn’t want to leave before she refunded our money, but she went ahead and switched off all the electricity, wifi, and anything else that she could. After that we were left with no place to go, in a foreign country, having to find other accommodations at 7:00 pm.
The next day we continued to receive threatening messages saying that we were disrespectful and she would pursue legal action if we posted anything online. What a wonderful first experience with Airbnb! The problem is, no one is allowed to leave any feedback before completing a stay. Very often the reviews would be skewed towards the positive. So people like us who got chased out for a small matter were unable to leave any feedback on Airbnb. Although the host cancelled our stay on the day we arrived, this was not shown on <a href=”https://www.airbnb.com.sg/rooms/3775738″>her page</a>.