Airbnb Bad Experience

316 followers

Updated 7 years ago

They seem to be getting a lot of attention lately, so I thought I'd chime in with my bad experience with Airbnb.

A while ago, I was looking for accomodation for a few days and my internet search made me aware of Airbnb, so I checked out the site and decided to see what it was all about.

I needed to register, so I did this using the email address that was requested and having confirmed this, decided to have a look for dates and places to stay.

Nope - I needed to add a mobile phone number and confirm that. Not a big deal, as my number is on my company website, so I did this and tried again for dates and places.

Nope - I needed to add a credit card. WHAT!?! I haven't ordered anything, why do they need payment details?!? In fact, I hadn't even made an enquiry as to availability, so asking for a credit card seemed a tad previous to me. Fortunately, there was an option to pay by bank transfer later, so I chose that and looked again.

Nope - they needed my passport details. Wait a minute, this is getting ridiculous - I just want to rent a room for a few days, I'm not getting married to them.

I thought that maybe they just needed to know that I had a passport, so I masked the important numbers and tried to use that, but no - they needed ALL the information.

This was the point that I said, "Enough is enough". They are a bit too keen on data that doesn't really concern them. I mailed them, explaining that I was very unhappy about providing so much unnecessary personal information, especially as I hadn't even made an availability request yet, let alone actually bought anything. I also suggested that they google "identity theft" and get back to me with justification for their requirements.

I got an answer which basically said that they need it and there's no exception and if I want to use their service, I have to provide it all.

I have no idea if I'd reached the end of the chain with the passort details, or if there were 20 further things that they needed to know. Nowhere does it say, "We will need the following pieces of information to fully process your details".

I replied that I was not prepared to divulge this information to them and asked them to remove all my data from their systems and to confirm that they had done this.

A week later, I received the confirmation that all of my data had been removed.

This should be the end of the story but sadly, it's not.

About 6 weeks later, I received a standard mail from them with updated terms and conditions. Seems they hadn't deleted anything. They lied and kept my data - that is disgraceful and unforgivable.

Fortunately, it's easy to set up email filters, sending anything from them directly into the trash folder.

So in summary, I'm not impressed with Airbnb and I find their honesty quite 'underwhelming'.