Josh M.

Airbnb has the worst customer support I have ever experienced. After booking accommodation for a large group trip 5 months in advance, I realized the second half of the home charge did not come through 2 weeks before the trip. I decided to call to make sure that our reservation was indeed still confirmed at which point I was told that I had canceled it with no evidence whatsoever that this was the case and that I would not be getting my money back for the first charge. The Airbnb representative then tried to convince me to book another place with the same host instead of taking any culpability for canceling my reservation and refused to issue me a refund. After several more unanswered exchanges and hours of calls, another Airbnb representative again told me that I was the one who had canceled the reservation and even mistakenly sent me a message on the platform saying "adv that we can't cancel reso's so nicely I told him that had to have been him or a user on the acct." Finally, I got someone to actually do some digging and realized that Airbnb did, in fact, trigger the cancellation of my reservation. At this point, it took THREE additional weeks for them to back to me to say they were going to issue me a refund.

I had spent 15 hours on the phone with representatives telling me that I was wrong. I had had several emails go unanswered. I had to book a new house through VRBO at the last second. And literally, all Airbnb provided me was a refund on the money for the house that they had canceled on me 2 weeks before my trip. No apology. No additional compensation.

While I'm sure many people will continue to use the service - as I did before this experience - I would strongly discourage anyone from doing so and caution that at some point you will have to deal with Airbnb's customer service and it is worse than any airline you've ever encountered and will not end well.