Ruud B.

With this review I would like to warn home owners who are renting out their accomodation through Airbnb.Over a decade I have listed my 2 houses on Airbnb. In my settings I always use the "first enquiry before official confirmation of the rental agreement". This weekend I suddenly got an instant booking on a period which was impossible for renting out. For some reason the settings were changed to "Instant" booking. So I had to cancel the booking. For this I got a € 188,- penalty from AIRBNB.

My first thought was that this for sure was a mistake by Airbnb. But...their final comment is that I am the only one able to change settings. And so I made the change... and have to pay this rather strange fine.

I did some investigation which shows that suddenly also my offline houses were all changed to "instant booking." As being not a real handy guy in changing settings. (It will take a day for me to find where to make such a change) I am quite sure that it was not me who made these changes. I can not prove it but with this the warning to all homeowners to check if their settings are suddenly changed and perhaps respond to this review as I have a strong impression Airbnb does change settings. The reason for it is obvious. Either to gain extra profit by rental fees or by giving penalties for cancellations.

It's obvious that Cupid had extreme bad reviews at the very start and now... recently extremely positive reviews. Did they improve their business model? As a writer of a book about internet dating it doesn't take too much investigation that something could be wrong over here. The problem of all review sites is that fake reviews are made to get better rankings. And if a website gets mainly 5 or 1 star reviews you should be carefull.