AIRBNB AND A STRANGE CASE OF SLEEPING ROUGH

HOMELESSNESS is visibly manifested on the streets of our cities by those sleeping rough — usually men of middle age, or so it seems to me.

But are all these pitiable specimens of dereliction actually homeless? I ask, only because of what happened to a friend of mine (herself a full-time charity worker).

She’d booked a flat in Reigate, Surrey, for a single night using the immensely fashionable Airbnb.

On arrival, she immediately noticed that the host stank of booze. The place looked very well lived-in and he explained that it was his only home.

When she asked where he would be staying for the night, he said that he’d be sleeping rough in Reigate Priory Park — as he always did when people booked his flat on Airbnb.

Unfortunately, when my friend returned to the flat after the wedding party that she’d been attending, the keys he’d given her didn’t work.

And her Airbnb host must have passed out in the park with all the drink he had taken because he never answered her frantic calls to his mobile.

So she had to pay through the nose for a (very) late night taxi to take her back to her home in a different county — and then return the next day to pick up her stuff from the Airbnb host after he had eventually woken up and answered her calls.

She wanted to post a review of this debacle on the Airbnb website, but was blocked from doing so because the ‘host’ had craftily pre-empted her complaint by reporting her to the site for ‘threatening’ behaviour. She is in fact as unthreatening a person as you could imagine.

And Airbnb initially refused to authorise any refund, only doing so after my friend persisted with her complaint for a fortnight.

Perhaps this unscrupulous host was unique in his methods: or is it possible there are others who have turned rough sleeping into part of the gig economy?