Would you dare let a stranger sleep in your bed?
Airbnb is the new middle-class wheeze: renting out your home to foreign holidaymakers or booking families’ homes abroad for your trip. But you could be in for a nasty surprise
UNTIL recently, the idea of staying in a stranger’s home while on holiday would have struck most Britons as downright bizarre — and more than a little dangerous.
Yet with hotels, flights and package deals soaring in price, more and more middle-class families are choosing to do just that.
Last year, more than two million of us turned our backs on professionally run hotels in favour of the flats and houses of ordinary homeowners, booked through the website Airbnb.
The site — founded in 2008 and now worth £15 billion — was once the preserve of cashstrapped young travellers happy to sleep on sofas. But these days it’s attracting a growing number of celebrity jet- setters, including actress Gwyneth Paltrow and singer Beyonce, as well as middle-aged holidaymakers looking for something a little bit different.
You can rent anything from a country castle to a garden shed, and the sheer number of properties available, including 81,000 across Britain, help to keep prices competitive.
But, of course, staying in a stranger’s house — or letting a stranger stay in yours — is not without its perils.
Some of the site’s users claim that both their holidays and homes have been ruined by duplicitous hosts and deviant guests, while others have become victims of unwanted sexual advances.
Worryingly, the website has also become a magnet for conmen, who scam money out of unsuspecting holidaymakers by posting pictures of fake properties on the site and demanding that money for rental is transferred into private accounts, instead of via the official Airbnb system, which protects guests’ money.
Here we reveal how to beat the scammers and holiday like a star with Airbnb.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
HoMEoWNERS use the website to advertise either a single room or their whole property for rent, uploading pictures of what’s on offer and setting the price per night.
Potential guests can contact the host through the website to ask questions or make a booking, and afterwards both travellers and homeowners can leave reviews of one another.
Homeowners set their own prices and Airbnb makes its money by charging both host and guest commission (6 to 12 per cent for guests and 3 per cent for hosts).
The site was founded by 27-year-old San Francisco design graduates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia when they realised hotel rooms for an upcoming design conference were limited, so they bought blow-up mattresses and charged visitors for a night on their living room floor and a home-cooked breakfast the next morning.
‘Airbnb’ was born — named in honour of the airbeds it all began with. Its London offices opened in 2011 and Airbnb now offers nearly two million places to stay in 190 countries. So far, 70 million people have stayed in an Airbnb.
STAY IN A CASTLE . . .
DESPITE its budget beginnings, Airbnb has cornered the luxury holiday market. The priciest Airbnb properties are akin to the most prestigious hotels, offering similarly impressive staff, service and stunning locations.
Astonishingly, there are 28 castles listed in England alone on Airbnb. Braylsham Castle in East Sussex, for example, is modelled on a 12th century manor house. For £1,000 a night you get a moat, a butler, chef and your own maid.
Fenton Tower on the outskirts of Edinburgh — a favoured destination of King James I — costs £1,080 a night and boasts five bedroom suites with antique roll-top baths, a 32seater dining room and library.
Pentillie Castle, set on the Cornish banks of the River Tamar, is similarly grand and has nine bedrooms and 55 acres of gardens. But it will set you back £1,750 a night.
For a taste of the regal lifestyle without the eye-watering prices, you could hire a single room with a fourposter bed in a 19th century castle in Cumbria for £140-a-night. You will be sharing the property with the owners who promise ‘ you can be King, Queen, Prince or Princess for a day, a week or as long as you like’.
. . .OR TRY A SHED
IF You don’t have a millionaire’s bank balance — or a fear of enclosed spaces — there are a host of tiny properties on offer on the site, many of which bear more than a passing resemblance to garden sheds.
one, the aptly named Tiny House at Lochinver, Sutherland, is a miniature wooden property on wheels with a composting lavatory and a bed that you need to climb a ladder to get into.
However, its owner stresses, this is ‘emphatically not a caravan’ and has ‘more or less all you need in a house, except space’ at £67 a night.
If decadence isn’t your thing, the £55-a-night Cosy Self- Contained Garden Annexe i n Winchester, Hampshire, markets itself as a ‘small but beautifully formed’ property with a pull-out sofa and underfloor heating. Not bad for a garden shed.
or try the ‘Gorgeous London Cabin’ — again essentially a garden shed, with a shared bathroom, but one marketed as ‘a perfect little private romantic abode to escape the buzz of the city’. And, at £45 a night, it is considerably cheaper than most of the capital’s glitzy alternatives.
THE CELEB HOMES
FoR homeowners whose properties were once owned by film stars and other celebrities, Airbnb is something of a money spinner.
The six- bedroom, 3,000 sq ft Hollywood home owned by bigscreen actress Emily Blunt until last year is on Airbnb for £400 a night.
Charles Dickens’ London home is available for £175 a night as, apparently, is Dame Julie Andrews’s old upstate New York property, The Rubber House, for £335 a night.
Charlie Chaplin’s former Los Angeles house is on the site for £70, as is rock star Jimi Hendrix’s old home in Hawaii for the same price.
THE CELEB FANS
DESPITE wealth that puts the world’s finest hotels at her disposal, actress Gwyneth Paltrow rented an Airbnb property for a sunshine break this month.
Her house wasn’t exactly a modest affair, however. At £5,812-a-night, the villa in Nayarit, Mexico, boasted six bedrooms, two infinity pools, concierge services and a waiter.
Even the notoriously fussy Paltrow, 43, who whisked her new boyfriend Brad Falchuk and two children away with her, was impressed. She posted a picture of herself and daughter Apple at their prime beachfront location on social media alongside the caption ‘@airbnb who knew?’
Gwyneth isn’t the only famous face with an audacious budget to book into an Airbnb. Singer Beyonce, 34, this week posted a picture of herself on the sofa of the £7,000-a-night Airbnb she stayed in while in San Francisco for the Super Bowl.
Pop star Mariah Carey, 45, is such a fan that she has twice rented out a property i n California through Airbnb — posting a picture of herself in her £6,000-a-night beachfront five-bedroom home in a gated community on Instagram last November alongside the caption: ‘Enjoying Malibu in my @airbnb.’
GUESTS FROM HELL
RENTING your house out to strangers can go horribly wrong, however, as Christina McQuillan discovered last month after handing over her £500,000 flat in Putney, South-West London, for the night.
Christina claims a 21- year- old guest threw a wild party with over 60 guests at her property. She returned home after neighbours complained of blaring music to allegedly discover visitors had smoked cannabis, had sex on her bed and ripped her TV off its brackets.
Christina, a magazine designer, 31, who describes her ordeal as ‘horrific’, also says she was punched in the stomach by one of the party before evicting the guest, who paid £138 a night for the privilege of staying.
Airbnb claims ‘ zero tolerance to this kind of behaviour’, but is often powerless to prevent it.
Nigel Broome, who recently rented out his new-build home in SouthEast London, returned to £12,000 worth of damage, including holes in the walls, a flooded kitchen and ruined flooring.
‘ The people who r ented it presented themselves as holidaymakers, but they basically came and just held a massive New Year’s Eve party,’ he says.
HORRIBLE HOSTS
oF CouRSE, guests don’t always get what they bargained for either.
Holly Davis booked an Airbnb in Central London in August for £100 as a base for herself and her four f riends who were going to the Notting Hill carnival.
‘our host told us to try not to stand under the kitchen ceiling for too long as it had a dangerous dip in it. We assumed he was joking,’ says Holly, 22, a marketing consultant from Harrow, Middlesex.
Yet the friends returned home to discover the ceiling had fallen down, leaving a gaping hole 5ft wide and a kitchen full of rubble, dust and splintered wood. ‘The host was clearing up apologetically,’ says Holly. ‘We were stunned — had we been in the room we could have been hurt.’
Worse still, Holly slept on a sofabed in the kitchen that night, as there were not enough beds i n the cramped flat.
‘I had a fitful night wondering if the whole thing was going to fall down,’ says Holly, who was given a £20 refund by her host and turfed out three hours before checkout so he could fix the ceiling.
ONLINE SCAMS
WoRRYINGLY, cri minals are managing to circumvent Airbnb’s system by copying details of
properties online and re-listing them on the site.
They demand that money for the rental is transferred upfront by guests into private accounts — instead of via the official Airbnb system — and then disappear with the cash.
‘The crooks exploit a weak link i n what s hould be a s ecure system,’ explains Chris Emmins, co - f ounder of KwikChex, an online investigations and authentication business.
‘By using the “contact an owner directly” resource, the consumer can allow a fraudster to produce correspondence such as email addresses and documents that are similar but not exact matches of the official Airbnb ones, fooling them i nto believing that they are sti l l working within t he Airbnb system.’
In 2012, 1. 5 million people reported losing money through this kind of scam on Airbnb and similar websites, but ABTA — the UK’s l argest t r avel association — estimates there are f ar more unreported crimes.
Airbnb encourages guests to search for property listings with detailed profiles, positive reviews and photos with a ‘ verif i ed photography’ watermark, which indicates that the pictures have been taken by one of Airbnb’s professional photographers.
ROMANCE ’N’ RENT
A GROWING number of Airbnb guests and hosts are making amorous advances towards each other while using the service.
Among them is a 25- year-old architect from London who recently told current affairs magazine Business Insider that he made love to a 36- year-old Brazilian woman when he stayed at a property booked through Airbnb in July 2014.
He didn’t reveal if the woman was his host or a fellow guest, but said: ‘I asked if she would come to my bedroom.
‘She did — and we had amazing sex. This continued every night for the rest of the week.’
Another Airbnb user said she’d had sex with her host, whom she describes as a ‘silver fox’ while at a coastal destination in England.
There is a darker side to these Airbnb liaisons, however.
In 2014, Colombian Pablo Cesar Cordoba riascos was jailed for nearly 12 years for raping two young U.S. holidaymakers who had rented his Barcelona flat through Airbnb.
‘ You never know the person who’s coming to visit and you’re putting your faith in their honesty,’ warns travel expert Kate Stinchcombe- gillies.
which, it seems, can have both magical and catastrophic results.