How we (almost) got scammed on Airbnb
Next leg of the journey
We’re in Bucheon, South Korea, trying to plan our next leg of the journey: Hong Kong. We have the flight tickets, but in around 10 days we will arrive in HK and we have no place to stay.
Looking for accommodation in HK
We start our online search for accommodation and as always we end up choosing between Booking.com and Airbnb.com. The only rooms we find on booking at a reasonable price are shared rooms in hostels. Some private rooms, but most of them with bad reviews. Our search criteria on Booking.com is based on price, from low to high. And depending on the rating and reviews we choose the one we think would suit us best. Usually we are looking for accommodations with not less than 7-8 stars. This is because we travel on a budget, so we can’t afford to be too picky. And it never happened to have to scroll down more than 1 page to find a good place for a reasonable price.
We are not being endorsed/sponsored in any way by Airbnb. This is just our thoughts based on a real experience. So we will continue to use Airbnb and we recommend it to other travellers. So far, they seem to offer a great service and as we learnt through this experience, their clients are their main priority.
*You may ask why aren’t we upset with them? Because in the end we were scammed through their website. They allowed the propriety to be listed on their website. They allowed this scam to happen. You can read more about airbnb and how it works on their website. But just in a few words, like many similar platforms out there, nobody takes full responsibility and nobody can do full checks on so many properties. These mainly work on ratings and reviews from other people. So when you choose to go to a place which is a new listing or has no reviews, you kind of take that into account. That it can go wrong. Most of the time it doesn’t. It also depends on the country you find yourself in and several other factors. The important thing is for these platforms to try and do right by you, if things have gone wrong.
In the end, we all know life can be risky, but it’s good to know that there are people out there who have your back.
To good to be true
However, after applying our search criteria for HK, we found ourselves scrolling through three pages and eventually we just give up, because the prices are already too high. We decide to turn our attention to the Airbnb app. It doesn’t take us long to find a great place at a good price. It is an entire flat, with two bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom. All for us. The price is the best we can get when comparing it to other places. So we decided to book it. It doesn’t have any reviews, as it is a new listing. But we’ve booked new listing before and all was good.
As a matter of fact we have been using Airbnb for more than a year now and quite often. Never had problems. So of course we didn’t think anything can go wrong now either.
Oh, but we were in for a big surprise! 😬
Our request to book the place is granted straight away. Travelling and being most of the time out and about exploring, we usually have very restricted WiFi connection. We manage to check our Airbnb inbox after a couple of days and see a message from the host. It says that unfortunately she doesn’t think she can host us anymore because the previous guests broke her TV. She said she brought it up to the attention of Airbnb and that she is now waiting to hear from them. In the meantime she can’t confirm that she can host us. We agree to wait a couple more days, as there was still time and worst case scenario we will just find a place to stay when we reach Hong Kong.
Contacting AirBnB
This is not a reason to freak out, especially when going to a big city, with countless options when it comes to accommodation. Two days pass and she says nothing. We contact her again and she says that she still has not heard from Airbnb. It becomes very obvious that she has no interest in sorting the issue ASAP. She also says that we should cancel the reservation. Having used Airbnb for so long we know their T&Cs and cancelling is not something that you want to do, especially if the problem comes from your host and not you. You usually loose the Airbnb booking fee and depending on the cancellation policy of the listing, you can loose more money. We ask her to cancel and she doesn’t want to. So we decide to take the situation into our own hands.
We contact Airbnb Customer Service, by sending them a message through the app. It takes around 1 day for them to respond, as we don’t specify it is an Emergency. It really wasn’t. We still had time to sort it out, no matter what. We ask Customer Service if indeed the host had said anything to them about the broken TV. We were looking to see if she is lying, as we got the feeling that the whole situation is a bit dodgy. The Customer Service assistant tells us that he spoke to her and that she agrees to host us. In the same time he replies to us, the host also replies informing us that if we are happy with having no TV in our room and we have no other options, she will host us.
The wait
However, the main concern now is the fact that the Airbnb assistant has not actually replied to our question. Is there really a broken TV? Did she have any other guests before us?
Anyway, having the “go ahead” and the reassurance from Airbnb we keep our booking. All is good and we don’t hear from the host in the following days. We decide to text her once we land in Hong Kong. We send her a message on Airbnb, letting her know that we have arrived and that we will check in at 3pm. This was around 10am. We ask her for the check-in details and if there is anything else we need to know. We wait for her reply around 3 hours. We thought the check-in was supposed to be anytime after 3pm. We realise later that we could have checked-in starting with 8am. So she should have been available to provide us with all the details. Actually she should have sent us the check-in procedures before the check-in time.
The call
Because it’s been already 3 hours, we ask our friends from HK to contact her and see what’s going on. They speak Chinese, she speaks Chinese. Should be easier than us trying to have a conversation with her. They call her, but it appears that the number is not allocated. We instantly realise that we’ve been scammed.
We try to contact Airbnb. This time not through messages, but we call them. Now this is an emergency. We are at the airport with no place to go to, after having been reassured by them that it is all ok. We don’t buy SIM cards in every country we go to, especially if we spend less than 3 weeks there. In HK we stayed only 7 days, so no need for a SIM card. We try to find a number on their app where we can call, but it says there that “at the moment the lines are closed.” We google Airbnb contact numbers and get the same one as on their app. We try and call them using the Airport’s WiFi.
We need to find a new place
They don’t have WhatsApp. So our only chance is to try with Skype. Usually the 0800 numbers work just fine. They are free of charge and it works to call those numbers using Skype, no matter where you find yourself in this world. As long as you have WiFi connection. We used it so many times. It’s a life saver! 😁
It worked. We are now on the phone with a Customer Service assistant. We’ll call her L. I tell her the whole story and ask if she has access to the conversation between me and the host. She says she does. After a few more questions, L. tells me that she will contact the host to see what’s going on. In the meantime Airbnb will give us a credit to go to a restaurant and eat something. I tell her that I appreciate the gesture and how they take care of their clients, but I also know that there is no way we are going to stay at that place after everything that’s happened. We thought that this is not a genuine listing, very possibly a scam. She listens as I explain my concerns and tells me that “we will sort this in a different way”. But first, she still needs to call the host to let her know about the cancellation, or at least try to contact her. Given that we don’t have a phone number where we can be reached, we agree that once she will make that phone call, she will get back to me via the Airbnb Messenger. It takes less than 2 minutes and she texts us. L. says that the host is unreachable and that we should not worry that they will find a solution for this.
New booking
She then gives us a list with similar places to stay. All of them are at least double the price and all are private rooms. Not entire flats as the one we initially booked. I tell her that we are ok with private rooms, but not with the price. We also let her know that we travel the way that we do and our budget is split accordingly. And because we have been reassured by Airbnb that the host and place are ok, we knew that this will be what we will spend it HK on accommodation. Based on to this booking we had made other bookings and travel plans. This was very inconvenient for us and not to mention we were so so tired and we just wanted to get this over with.
We didn’t have to say this twice. Straight away, L. asks us to choose a new listing from the list she gave us. As soon as we choose one, she tells us that we will be charged the same price as per our initial booking. We ended up paying less than half of the price of our new booking.
The Airbnb assistant was more than helpful and very understanding of the situation we were in. This is the first time when we have to deal with something like this, when it comes to Airbnb. And we really have to hand it to them. When dealing with our case they were really professional and made us feel valued. Even having been faced with this unpleasant situation, we will continue to use Airbnb. The way they handled the the whole thing, we now know that if things like this happen again, Airbnb will be there to help. We always say that we learn something from each and every experience. Be it good or bad, we learn! And that’s what we did here 😊
We can enjoy HK now
We are not being endorsed/sponsored in any way by Airbnb. This is just our thoughts based on a real experience. So we will continue to use Airbnb and we recommend it to other travellers. So far, they seem to offer a great service and as we learnt through this experience, their clients are their main priority.
*You may ask why aren’t we upset with them? Because in the end we were scammed through their website. They allowed the propriety to be listed on their website. They allowed this scam to happen. You can read more about airbnb and how it works on their website. But just in a few words, like many similar platforms out there, nobody takes full responsibility and nobody can do full checks on so many properties. These mainly work on ratings and reviews from other people. So when you choose to go to a place which is a new listing or has no reviews, you kind of take that into account. That it can go wrong. Most of the time it doesn’t. It also depends on the country you find yourself in and several other factors. The important thing is for these platforms to try and do right by you, if things have gone wrong.
In the end, we all know life can be risky, but it’s good to know that there are people out there who have your back.
October 5, 2018 @ 7:25 am
I don’t even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was good. I do not know who you are but definitely you are going to a famous blogger if you are not already 😉 Cheers!
April 10, 2021 @ 9:59 pm
Hello! Thank you very much for the comments, it would be great if you could share the Airbnb customer service phone number you used to fix the problem…
Thank you !
My best