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wife had rented via airbnb in london a few years back. Booked for... 10 days. It was close to $2000. Got there - TV broken. No curtains on window in main ro

wife had rented via airbnb in london a few years back. Booked for... 10 days. It was close to $2000. Got there - TV broken. No curtains on window in main room, which faced an office block close enough where people could see you and you could see them. You had to walk between bedroom and bathroom through the main room. Leftover food in the fridge ("you can eat that if you want, previous people didn't finish it"). 2 hangars in a closet. Shower head didn't work - sprayed water out of the top, but not down. After 3 days of 'complaints' (messaged on airbnb and directly), my wife got an extra 6 hangars and the shower 'fixed', sort of. They claimed she must have broken the TV - no one previously had complained. My wife provided video and picture evidence of this to airbnb - no support. Hosts threatened to provide negative feedback to her and essentially blackball her with other hosts in London. We provided THAT messaging to airbnb - still nothing. airbnb's position was "well, if it was bad, you should have left and we might have refunded some of your money". Leave $2k with them, go spend another... $2000 on hotel someplace else (assuming you can even get anything short notice), then hope/pray you get some refund? I think we have waived some chargeback ability because of T&C we'd agreed to (I might be misremembering this). We should have pressed chargeback with cc company. It was horrible experience, and we've not used them since.

Reason077 5y ago
> ”No curtains on window in main room, which faced an office block close enough where people could see you and you could see them.” This place sounds terrible, and of course it should have had curtains. But the part about facing onto other buildings is pretty normal in London.
- lowercased 5y ago
  sure - my wife used to live in london years back, so isn't a complete stranger. but... seeing pictures of a room that has curtains, then getting there and not having curtains is just nuts.
woutr_be 5y ago
> well, if it was bad, you should have left and we might have refunded some of your money Heh, VRBO said the exact opposite to us. Essentially "you should've stayed at the property, but since you left, we can't help you". One of our major complaints was that you had to walk through he first bedroom in order to get to the second. For two adults, that's just a stupid arrangement, and should've been mentioned up front.
- ratww 5y ago
  At this point I believe they'll use any excuse not to refund you. Had you stayed they would have asked the question above.
  - woutr_be 5y ago
    Like I said, they've refunded the 10% service fee that they normally take, and this was only after pointing out that the owner had broken their TOS. The other 90% is still lost, and they claim there's nothing they can do about it.

Reason077 5y ago

> ”No curtains on window in main room, which faced an office block close enough where people could see you and you could see them.” This place sounds terrible, and of course it should have had curtains. But the part about facing onto other buildings is pretty normal in London.

lowercased 5y ago
sure - my wife used to live in london years back, so isn't a complete stranger. but... seeing pictures of a room that has curtains, then getting there and not having curtains is just nuts.

woutr_be 5y ago

> well, if it was bad, you should have left and we might have refunded some of your money Heh, VRBO said the exact opposite to us. Essentially "you should've stayed at the property, but since you left, we can't help you". One of our major complaints was that you had to walk through he first bedroom in order to get to the second. For two adults, that's just a stupid arrangement, and should've been mentioned up front.

ratww 5y ago
At this point I believe they'll use any excuse not to refund you. Had you stayed they would have asked the question above.
- woutr_be 5y ago
  Like I said, they've refunded the 10% service fee that they normally take, and this was only after pointing out that the owner had broken their TOS. The other 90% is still lost, and they claim there's nothing they can do about it.