Erosion of the trust-bubble: the past-tense value of Airbnb

Who remembers when Airbnb was a trustworthy, friendly, and hip way to find a home away from home?
I was a convert from the proverbial square one and have been a guest of Airbnb hosts in accommodations ranging from a funky boho airstream on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill to a charming, film-lover’s apartment in Madrid’s city center. My husband and I have socialized and cooked dinners for our hosts and…we’ve kept totally to ourselves.
The “trustedness” factor + variety is an essential element of what used to be the Airbnb mystique. I make a mess, my host reports it. My hosted accommodations aren’t as advertised, I report it. In theory, bad reviews lead to decreased business and people keep their noses clean on both sides of the equation in order to support their ongoing ability to benefit from the platform. Combined with a snappy, easy-to-navigate mobile platform and mutual host/guest vetting, for years I found Airbnb’s value proposition to be frankly, unbeatable.
What tears me up and what prompts this post is the simple fact that I believe that this unbeatable value is fast becoming past tense.
How did I go from convert to critic? It all begins in London.
Austrian school kids get to enjoy a week’s break from school at the end of October. So, as we’ve got two kids in school, we decided to take them on a quick four-night jaunt across the mini-pond to explore London. Neither kid had been before, and now that their English is pretty keen and they don’t mind sightseeing, this seemed like a great time of year and opportunity. London is a spendy place, and with two tween/teen boys, an Airbnb is just the ticket to be able to have a kids’s sleeping room and a grown-up sleeping room as well as be able to cook breakfast at home and be prepared for the imminent post-dinner dinners (parents of growing boys, you know what I mean!).
7 months out, we booked a groovy pad with plenty of space, in a great location. We paid a 50% deposit, pending a final payment 30 days or so before the start of the stay. Three months later, however, we received a notice via the platform that our stay had been cancelled by the host and that we would receive a full refund of our deposit. There was no info given about why the host cancelled, and we just ho-hummed and went on our merry way. We browsed for a replacement several times over the ensuing weeks, but didn’t select anything until about a month out from our trip.
Realizing we’d better hop-to, I logged into my account and spent an afternoon on the site, updating my London wishlist and preparing to send my husband a few options for consideration. As always, the questions for us are: style, location, price, bed/bathroom count, and being able to picture ourselves fitting into the space. If you are an Airbnb browser, you know that the same properties come up time and again, even when you change your search parameters, and you fast get to know your ideal candidates. In this search, a new property popped up that I hadn’t seen in any previous searches. It was beautiful, with gorgeous pictures, a divine location, and room for the boys to each have their own room. The price point was a little higher than what we were hoping for, but the amenities and location were spot on. The listing said that the host was traveling abroad and that his connection to the calendar for the property wasn’t working properly. So, interested parties should email him directly to check availability and get a total price quote. I took a screenshot of the listing and sent an email including the screenshot straight away.
I wish it had ended there.
The long and short of it is that this was a total scam that we only discovered after being checked into our flights the night before our stay and pinging several times via email for information about how to get into the apartment at check-in. Tracing back, I can see that once I started interacting with the host directly via email, I accepted every link he gave me for payment and further information as coming from Airbnb. I had even copied the link he sent me from his email and shared it with the kids on WhatsApp so that they could show their friends. The messages, confirmations, and payment receipt that I got through email looked as they should: the fonts and graphics were the same, the language was the same, and the links containing the listing number and www.airbnb.com: All. Looked. The same.
Except they weren’t. Looking back with the help of an Airbnb Customer Support specialist, I discovered subtle, subtle differences in the link structure, and that the way that my email browser displayed the links was either as clickable graphics or as regular words set-up as URL links. I might have noticed. I might not have. I have worked with websites and as a social media manager for many years, typing in URLs, creating redirects, etc.. And I still didn’t catch this.
Here’s the assumption set that contributed to my veil:
- Airbnb vets its hosts and verifies its listings
- I found this listing on the Airbnb.com website, not through Craigslist or a general web search for London apartments…it can’t get on there if it’s not real…
- Scams only happen to people who give out their credit card number over the phone and who believe that they owe college debt that they don’t
- You can’t get a hosting profile without being verified and/or ID-checked
- You can get your money back anyway
- Looks like a duck: I clicked images, looking at my phone, without looking at what the URLs really were. I also fell victim to clicking through on emails rather than going native in the system. You don’t have to be in the Airbnb app (or site) in order to send and receive official messages. The site sends you email versions of your legitimate messages, but always tells you to read the complete message by clicking through to the platform; this is supposed to ensure that you are always in the system when you are reading and writing. Except that the scam messages did this too, and took me to a website that looked identical to the real one. I couldn’t have seen the difference unless I’d tried to access OTHER messages or listings in my account.
A simple Google search on “Airbnb scams London” yields a sickening flood of press stories, blog posts and more — clearly this is not uncommon in the least. And further, there are many other high-price, high-volume markets across the world where this type of fraud is rampant. In many cases, photos are harvested from real estate listings, other vacation home rental sites, and even legitimate Airbnb listings in the same or other markets. These photos are used to create false listings, and the level of detail to which the scammers go is not to be underestimated. I certainly underestimated the level of thoroughness that someone would go to just to rip somebody off. I’m naïve not to have seen that this kind of active and blatant theft is an full blown income stream in and of itself. Wouldn’t you get caught? Isn’t that a lot of work to do for a one-off deal? Answer…noooo! It’s easy and it’s big money!!!
Chatting with Airbnb, they were sympathetic but also kind of shruggy in a “lessons learned, buyer beware,” kind of way. The agent said this kind of thing happens all the time, and that usually people who fall prey to scams are following off-platform links. But sometimes, he said, scammer hosts even create false renter accounts for their legitimate listings that traffic money through the site, acting like real renters and creating positive reviews just so they can receive Superhost recognition. The end lesson is that you should seriously never-ever-ever communicate with hosts outside of the platform without verifying or duplicating communication through the platform, and certainly never-ever-ever send money outside the platform.
I get the total naïve baby award (With sash! With scepter!) because I even told the agent that I thought “they needed to know the depths my scammer went to to deceive me, and that I would take the time to write up some thoughts I had about what might make their disclosures more helpful.” And then I dug through the linked “read more” section in their fine print and realized that Airbnb and the already-scammed already know all this. It’s the rest of us casual users who don’t.
Why? Because we are trusting and remember how Airbnb used to be! Butterflies, rainbows, snuggly blankets and cool fire pits. Ground-floor boulangeries and cute puppies! Quirky walk-ups with interesting treasures and funny old books! Yaaay! And also because it’s pretty bad for business when a business founded on trustworthiness starts to rot.
The morale of the story is, use this platform and others like it at your own risk. This is no longer the upscale, hipster UI version of your grandparents’ vacation home rental site. Ripping people off is huge business, and in my opinion, Airbnb’s ability to monitor the veracity and behaviour of its on-platform hosts and properties has slipped behind its ability to collect fees and traffic the global vacation rental market. My experience here is about an out-and-out scam, but there are many documented examples about people whose bookings were real, but were substandard or switched at the last minute. With property managers and management companies handling mass rentals in many markets, you are less and less likely to meet the owner of your rental, and the accountability factor that the original peer-to-peer concept showcased is nowhere in sight. I worry that the days where ride-sharing, apartment-sharing, chore-sharing, and other platforms that depend upon moral governance by the communities they serve are bygone in practice, but continue to operate under new, unknown rules. I may be late to the party, but I’ll take moment to blow a noise-maker and send up a warning flare.
The scams are real, they are clever, and they are here.
Some things I’m taking to heart going forward:
- Using unsecured platforms like Craigslist leave you with zero muscle if you’re scammed
- When using a legitimate platform, make sure you are logged in and that the account really is yours. Check your messages and history really quick and get outta there if you can’t or if what you expect to be there isn’t. I think I’ve been lazy about this one, as I just look for my profile icon and give a lot of grace for systems not being updated or working slowly.
- Check links in email and on websites for formatting and structure against what you know to be legit. This is tedious and annoying, but better than being scammed.
- Always use a credit card (you may be able to successfully dispute a charge due to fraud/scamming)
- Do not send copies of your ID. At least with Airbnb and car services like Turo, they already have your ID in the system, and as payment is through the system, there is no need for a host to have this for verification or otherwise. I’ve heard that some European hosts ask for your passport details as a matter of course, but I would steer clear.
- When you’ve found someone to do business with, look at their profile, read their reviews, double check their “verification”, “superhost” and other badge statuses. Do a little front work on the site to see if you can educate yourself further about what the different designations mean on that platform. You may choose only to do business with people who have been legitimized over time, number of transactions, or review scores.
- Call the platform help-line if you have questions or something doesn’t smell right. Airbnb, for example, is easy to reach, but it’s hard to find the number. Keep digging through the Help tab until you find it and don’t pay until your concerns are satisfied. A helpful list of worldwide contact numbers is here.
- With Airbnb, if your accommodations are not as promised, contact them directly (not only your host) within 24 hours. Nowhere on the site could I find mention of the time limit, but as I understand it from one of their agents, Airbnb does not transfer funds to the host until 24-hours after check-in. They will help you find new accommodations and/or will force a 100% refund upon receiving adequate documentation of your situation. Once this 24-hours has passed, you are eligible for a maximum 50% refund.
- In the moment and in-person, take clear pictures of everything questionable and communicate through the platform so that your correspondence is documented. Airbnb agents, for example, can view this when they talk with you, and the date/time stamping works wonders to support your memory.
- Many hosts ask you to coordinate check-in/out or other arrangements via WhatsApp or SMS. If you do this, restate your agreements through the platform messaging app and also take screenshots of your external communication.
- In the event of a scam, immediately contact your local police to begin the process of filing a report. Your insurance, bank, and credit card will likely require this, and you don’t want to miss any timing windows.
- Question whether the savings or uniqueness of the offered car, accommodations, or experience is worth the risk. Explore what impact a bad experience or scam would have on your plans and decide accordingly. A great post I read about how to best use Airbnb reminded that the platform (and those like them) is a peer-to-peer network with the platform acting solely as the connection point. If you can’t stomach the risk or don’t want the personal connection, then these platforms might not be for you…even if they used to be.
- There really are bad people out there who don’t care if you’re a nice person, if you’ve saved for years for your vacation, or if your 11-year old can’t wait to sleep in the four-poster bed of their dreams. They will take your money and never look back.
