Air B & Beware

Public Service Announcement

This post is a bit different to my usual post it stands to offer caution to anyone who's a user of Airbnb. Now this is nothing against Airbnb but more a caution for you to take precautions to protect yourself from the subsequent accusations of Hosts.

Recently I stayed at this place, as it happens it was my first ever Airbnb experience:

It looked nice enough in the pictures but fairly quickly a few problems emerged, to summarise them it went like this:

• place was locked and apparently empty when I arrived, so I messaged the Host via the App (always use the app)
• Host messaged me back saying he was just down the road and would be back in 5 min
• half an hour later no sign and I messaged again, host replied he'd contacted his sister to let me in
• eventually someone inside let me in and briefly showed me around.
• much later a young woman arrived who identified herself as the Hosts sister
• I asked when the Host was going to come home and was told "he's flown out to Sydney tonight" meaning that his above message can only have been a lie.
• She was pretty unhelpful and it was hard to find anything to cook with (the house was very weirdly arranged)

That's it ... I left after 2 nights, this was in November.

Then on the 28th of December I get a message from the host accusing me of stealing property (a laptop and a yellow bag). I confirmed back to the host "were you accusing me of stealing this" to which the answer was yes, and that they had been photographing me and had pictures (which is illegal  in the state I live in). The host then said to return it or else they would report this to the police.

So rather than reply to them "good, please do so" I decided to instead contact (or as the current wanky words are "reach out to" (FMD) ) Airbnb  and report this.

As it happens I know that I didn't steal their laptop, as I had my own, which is a Linux based system. This has the advantage of allowing me to access the data about all WiFi systems my laptop connects to, stuff like this:

[connection]

id=******

uuid=6c1d9030-b5e1-4bfa-a49d-90c090c7e113

type=wifi

permissions=user:chris:;

[wifi]

mac-address=****

mac-address-blacklist=

mode=infrastructure

ssid=****

[wifi-security]

auth-alg=open

key-mgmt=wpa-psk

psk=****

which more or less allows me to identify their router uniquely and demonstrate clearly that my laptop was actually there. This makes a pretty solid case that any (illegally obtained) pictures of me carrying a laptop are going to show me carrying my own fucking laptop.

My message then is this...

So all this leads me to where I now see pretty clearly that after you leave an Airbnb the host can wait weeks (over a month in this case) before communicating with you to make accusations, threats and attempt to extort you.

So my advice is to do your best to enable you to have something to demonstrate you were innocent of any charges. If possible record with your phone any irregularities and be prepared to immediately cease contact with the host (do not argue with them) and go through Airbnb.

As it happens I got a plain and simple reply two weeks later saying:

 "...I reach out to your Host, and he mentioned that he already received your message and leave this case."

Which was unclear and pretty bad English. I sought clarification on what that meant, and apparently it meant they were withdrawing their accusation, but I can only imagine how much more frustration would have occured had I needed  to engage more.

No apology from the host, no apology from Airbnb.

To me this sort of shit is unacceptable, and in my research I uncovered that I'm not the only one who's encountered dodgy stuff: as you can read here ...

I will be from now on protecting myself against more of this sort of shenanigans from Hosts; I suggest you do the same too.

Best Wishes