我打算注销Airbnb账户了

本文只针对美国的Airbnb，其他地区不了解

Airbnb is no longer like when it newly started, when hosts are friendly people, who doesn’t take this as their main source of income, who just want to make friends and experience. Nowadays, there are a lot of people who want to rely their whole life finance on this income, while they are not willing to (or not able to) provide professional services as hotels.

Airbnb customer service and their policies to resolve disputes encourages this. They don’t have requirements for hosts, blames many things on guests, and even harass guests before the host provide enough evidence. At the same time, their prices are approaching those of the hotels.

I was asked for $25 loss by a landlord Chunyan who owns multiple real estate in California, because she found water on her table leaked from her own refrigerator. The picture uploaded several days after I left shows that the table surface peeled after being soaked in water, although when I left there was only plain water without noticeable change of the table (no oil, no greasy dirty food residue, not colored by coffee because I didn’t even use the table during my stay, so I just left, thinking I even saw a damp used coffee bag in the coffee machine, so it’s not surprising the previous guest also left a pool of water here.)

Please note: it’s a table dedicated for tea/coffee making and it doesn’t resist water. The landlord put a refrigerator, a water boiler, some cups and tea/coffee bags on it, and it doesn’t resist water! I only used coffee and tea in my company office, so I didn’t even touch those stuffs. There was no heads-up or any caveats about water causing damage, either.

At the mean time, everything seems precarious. The door lock is so problematical that a typical person needs to try 7-8 times before successfully locking it. Besides being difficult to operate, the lock also seems so fragile that I think the landlord also noticed it. She provided us a wood stick to resist the sliding door from moving, and help preventing malicious people breaking into the door.

The room must have got very stuffy during the day, because each night when I arrive back at around 10pm, it’s still so stuffy that even with the door wide open, it takes five minutes for the fan to circulate the heat out. No AC.

Such a place charged me $256.92 for three nights, while the lower end price for a night in a professionally managed hotel takes only $90+ in the same area. What’s more, the landlord together with Airbnb chased after me for the extra $25 for half a month.

During the days I was juggling with many other things in life and work, they asked me for “evidence” before a deadline, while knowing that I have no right to reenter the place to check it. Shouldn’t it be the accuser who must provide evidence? Evidence not only for the damage, but also for how damage is caused by my misbehaving.

The landlord only provided evidence for damage. However, I was harassed for this. I was harassed even after having explained that it’s caused by the landlord’s own refrigerator and I haven’t done anything improper that caused it, unless they ridiculously believe tuning the refrigerator temperature is improper for their guest. — I didn’t turn the refrigerator off, either.

It’s not difficult to infer that this setting of putting refrigerator and water boiler on a precarious table is likely caused by the following things:

1. The landlord crazily wants to gain profit from her real estate. She divided her original rooms into the smallest they can be, and squeezed everything with lowest price into each subroom, so that she can advertise as if they are tantamount or close to separate apartments.

2. The landlord has never invested in a professional background in hotel management, while she wants to get a profit close to professionally managed ones (see the price comparison I mentioned earlier.)

Airbnb probably support such evil landlords more than the casual and friendly ones, because these landlords gets more profit for them.

The original concept of Airbnb being a place where you find people similar to you hosting you in a casual home is gone. Now it’s just a place with profit-aiming capitalists, but they have much lower professional requirement for what they provide.

What’s more, Airbnb collects your privacy data to an extent you cannot imagine for traditional hotels, which you will learn from here: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2855. One of their policies says they collect your friend list from Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, etc. Do they decide on which party they support during disputes partly based on who has the more connections in the local?

They also think they’re correct to ask you to prove your innocence, rather than asking the accusers to prove what they accuse you for. I deem their behavior of contacting me repeatedly blaming the table damage on me as harassment. They shouldn’t even contact me and interrupt my life until they are able to prove that the damage is because of my improper behavior.

I have already decided to delete my Airbnb account and I suggest you be careful with them, too.