Bjondi D.

I have had an absolutely abysmal experience with Airbnb, and I have nothing but negative things to say about the host that cancelled my reservation as I landed in Miami the hour before I was due to check-in, about Airbnb not doing anything to resolve the issue, and about Airbnb's response to the situation after the fact. First, the host cancelled on my friend and I while we were in our flight to Miami from Chicago. Their only resolution was a downgrade from a 2 bedroom unit to a 1 bedroom unit which was not only unacceptable, but a poor show of good faith. Airbnb refused to find us a comparable or better listing the day of and cover any difference from our agreed upon price, and asked us to book another listing from our phones while we were at the airport the day of, which unsurprisingly yielded no results of equal value and all results were extremely overpriced, as would be expected for a day of booking in Miami. The least Airbnb could have done was found listings for us and paid the difference in cost from what we paid, much like Stubhub does when a customer receives bogus tickets through their service. Lastly, my friend left the hosts a terrible review, rightfully so as they ruined our trip to Miami, and the hosts returned the favor leaving my friend an equally terrible review even though the hosts cancelled on us! To make matters worse, Airbnb just took down my friend's negative review of the hosts, essentially not allowing us to leave a rightfully and truthful terrible review on the hosts. When a host cancels on a trip booked a month in advance on the day of, they deserve a poor review and other potential customers deserve to see the poor review and skip on booking with the host. Neither I or my friend are able to review the poor hosts on our cancelled trip, and the poor review that our host left my friend is still up. This is quite possibly the worst customer service I have ever experienced, and I am appalled that Airbnb would treat their customers like this. I will be posting poor reviews of Airbnb on every social media site and review site that I can find just to inform other potential customers to simply stay away from such a terrible service. It is not the fault of Airbnb when a host cancels on a customer, but the host should be severely penalized for doing so, especially the day of, and the customer should not only be made whole, but should be given an equal or better accommodation at no cost to the customer. It is then the absolute responsibility of Airbnb to make every effort to make the customer whole after the fact, as the cost of a cancelled trip on the day of the trip has much greater emotional harm than just the actual monetary cost of the situation. I am not sure how to describe what booking a new vacation from the airport on a cell phone is like in Miami without using very colorful language. It was a disaster. Airbnb has an absolute responsibility to at least allow its biased review system to be utilized in cases like this and to not cover up the atrocious behavior of its bad hosts. I cannot fathom why this part is particularly so frustrating. The good thing about social media is that even when a company decides to conceal its dark and shady treatment of customers on its own website, they cannot stop the disgruntled customers from spreading awareness through other platforms.