My Airbnb hell!
It sounds like the perfect middle-class money making scheme – rent out your house while you’re on holiday. Yet, when one mother returned home she was met with scenes of devastation
RETURNING from holiday and seeing the devastation that had been wreaked on our precious home in our absence, I fell to my knees feeling physically sick. My two-year-old daughter Lovell’s prized doll’s cradle had been smashed to pieces and a wheel from her older brother Humphrey’s bed, which is shaped like a car, had been wrenched off and discarded on the floor.
Elsewhere, a beautiful photograph of my wedding day in 2008 and a framed antenatal scan of my now five-year-old son were broken.
A mobile my children and I had made out of painted paper butterflies had been ripped apart — we found some of it behind a cupboard, and more in the laundry basket which had been used as a bin, in which we found a rotten apple core.
Rubbish and cigarette packets had been left lying around, sweets and yoghurt were ground into the carpet, there were marks on walls and the toilet seat was broken.
Wood around a door lock had been pulled off, Lovell’s white-painted floorboards were blackened with soil and pink highlighter had been used to scribble on her white dressing table.
Hundreds of small items from all over the house were piled randomly on top of one another in my children’s rooms. Hats, wellies and knick-knacks from downstairs were mixed up with items such as my husband Phil’s bow tie, which he had left in our wardrobe; my daughter’s underwear, which had been in her drawers; and lots of pieces of different children’s games.
It was devastating. But worse still was the knowledge I’d brought this nightmare on myself. For we hadn’t been burgled. Instead, I’d become an Airbnb host and rented out our house to strangers.
Airbnb, if you don’t already know, is a website launched in America eight years ago that lets you advertise rooms in your home, or indeed your whole house, to paying guests for a few days or weeks at a time.
For cash-strapped middle-class families like us, faced with crippling bills, rising prices and often stagnant wages, it’s seen as an easy way to make money from our primary (and often only) asset — the home.
In fact, there are now 52,000 British Airbnb hosts, many of them families like us who are looking for help with bills. A typical UK host can earn £2,000 a year by sharing a space in their home for 46 nights per year.
‘Almost half rely on the income they make by sharing their homes to make ends meet,’ says Airbnb.
That’s why I thought renting out our four-bedroom Victorian house in an English provincial city popular with tourists for two weeks last August would be a good idea.
I’ve been desperate for some extra income — as freelance writers with two small children, Phil and I could certainly use it. The money we received would allow us to rent a three-bedroom apartment in New York and have our first holiday in four years. I spent hours building a profile on
airbnb.co.uk to ‘sell’ our home. It’s easy — fill in some descriptions such as how many bedrooms and bathrooms you have, upload photos, set a price, and, provided your home looks appealing and is in a desirable location, watch bookings roll in.
Airbnb takes just 3 per cent of the payout from each booking and you can reject guests if you choose.
For those wanting places to stay, the process is even easier. Guests fill out a few details — name, address and so on — and once Airbnb has verified their email and a phone number, they can apply to stay anywhere around the world.
After a few days, a couple with children aged seven, five and three asked to rent our house for the exact two weeks when we hoped to go to New York. I was thrilled — we would make £1,177, of which we had to pay Airbnb a service fee of £46. The money would be paid into our bank account soon after check-in.
I checked the guests out carefully. For far from being a site that scrupulously checks out all the credentials of its advertisers and guests, Airbnb runs on trust — in fact, they say ‘Trust is what makes it work’. This is when warning bells should have rung.
After all, as for most people, my house is my pride and joy, lovingly tended to and full of memories. Why on earth would you invite strangers into that space when you’re not there? They could be anyone, even criminals. Airbnb says it may do background checks on guests or hosts outside the U.S., if it has enough information on users, but, as it stresses, checks ‘don’t always identify a person’s past crimes or other red flags . . . you should always exercise your own judgment’.
Essentially, you’re persuaded to trust by the popularity of the site and the reviews people leave of users. Every time someone stays in your house, you leave a review of their behaviour and they yours. The more good reviews you have, the more trustworthy you’re seen to be and the more likely you are to be allowed to stay in someone’s home.
However, the husband who’d applied to rent our house, who I’ll call Rob, had no reviews — it was his first time using Airbnb. But it was ours too so, naively, I didn’t think it that important.
Besides, he’d verified his profile with his government ID which put my mind at rest. Airbnb lets you ‘verify’ your account by scanning this document (or your passport and driver’s licence if, like us in the UK, you don’t have one) into their system.
As absolutely anyone can join the site under any name, this is meant to provide some extra peace of mind that they are who they say they are.
Wary, I wanted to do extra checks, so I Googled Rob and his wife. He appeared to be an established businessman, and she posted about Christianity. They sounded trustworthy.
Rob’s brief enquiry said he was graduating from a master’s programme at the university near us and wanted to bring his family to celebrate. He sent a photo of his student ID, too.
But his communications when booking were brusque — no ‘hellos’, and one message which read ‘Kindly respond as we have deadlines’.
And his profile picture, in which he posed in a suit, showing off a blingy watch, was pretty cringey.
But I ignored my qualms because I wanted our holiday.
Of course, Phil and I knew things could also turn disastrous. I read websites such as airbnbhell.com, where hosts post tales of nightmare guests who steal things, copy keys and annoy the neighbours and warn of complaints to the website going unresolved.
I was aware of horror stories in the news — this year alone an £8,000 Banksy print has been stolen from one host’s Islington property, and a Putney flat let out through Airbnb was trashed by up to 100 party-goers.
But my impression was that those were exceptional. Airbnb stresses its ‘zero-tolerance policy’ for bad guest behaviour, its £800,000 ($1 million) ‘host guarantee’, which refunds damages above the security deposit, and the rarity of problems.
It put my mind at rest. After all, thousands open their homes to strangers through Airbnb every day. Why should we be the unlucky ones?
Before we left, we charged Rob a £500 security deposit, and he agreed to our house rules (Airbnb recommend you set these) which included reporting any breakages, leaving things as he found them, no parties, and no smoking or illegal behaviour.
My parents, who live next door, kindly agreed to check the family in and out and keep an eye on things.
For a fortnight it wasn’t worth clearing the house out but, just to be on the safe side, my parents looked after valuables such as computers, jewellery and important documents.
After scrubbing the place top to toe,
It seemed a great way to pay for our own holiday I felt violated, with our beloved home trashed
we flew off for our New York holiday. My parents later phoned to say the guests seemed pleasant and polite and kept us updated throughout the fortnight, after short chats when they were coming and going, that all was fine.
So when we arrived home to find the house in disarray, and our children’s rooms trashed, it was devastating.
It sounds absurd to use a word like violation, but that’s how I felt.
The guests had disrespected not only our precious home, but the rooms where my children play and sleep; places where, until now, there had only been happy times.
My parents struggled to square the damage with the seemingly pleasant family they had met.
Thankfully, nothing was unsalvageable or irreplaceable, and the children weren’t a fraction as upset as we were.
But it took days to make everything ‘ours’ again, all the while being so angry at ourselves for falling for the Airbnb dream. The dream that it’s easy to make money out of your home because most people are trustworthy.
Yes, they may be. But when you get one who isn’t — or who, as in our case, lets their children run riot in a way I’d never let mine behave — it’s far more of a nightmare.
Before this happened, I was reassured by statistics such as 100 million people in 34,000 cities in 191 countries having used the site. But having seen the worst of Airbnb, I now can’t believe I welcomed strangers into my home.
Yes, I’d done my best to check up on them but there was no way for me to be certain that they didn’t have police records.
And they might be who they say they are, but that doesn’t mean they have the same values of decency and respect for others as I do.
It was hard to find out how to claim compensation from Airbnb through the ‘host guarantee’ — you really have to search for the ‘Resolution Centre’ on the site. I couldn’t find a customer service email address or phone number either.
Nor did I find much information on what, exactly, Airbnb does if your guest breaks your house rules.
But the first step was to try to resolve the situation directly with the tenants.
I had to say why we were making a claim and itemise costs — £900 for a handyman to repair the damage and repaint the floorboards, £420 for extra cleaning and £345 for replacing lost and damaged possessions. In total we asked for £1,665.
I’d taken photographs for evidence, although they barely conveyed the horror.
Rob denied everything. He said parents couldn’t be expected to monitor children all the time, and claimed they’d cleaned the house before leaving. It was ridiculous. So I went to Airbnb. Again, the process wasn’t userfriendly — you only get 100 words to explain the claim, you can’t update it or add photos once posted, and there was no email confirmation the claim was being handled.
A few days later, after chasing, I heard from an American advisor at Airbnb HQ.
She asked me for more evidence, so I sent, again, every photograph, my correspondence with Rob, and also our cleaner and handyman’s written quotations, testimonials, and phone numbers.
To our amazement, ten days after I first raised our dispute, I got an email confirming the full £1,665 compensation was being paid. We were very satisfied. Presumably Rob lost his £500 security deposit, but I assume Airbnb paid the rest.
They say such claims make up a tiny percentage of Airbnb stays. Spokesperson Alison Holberton told me that, in 2015: ‘Significant property damage (claims that were reimbursed under our Host Guarantee program for over $1,000) was reported to us 0.002 per cent of the time or approximately one in every 41,000 guest arrivals.’
She added: ‘One hundred million guests have stayed on Airbnb and problems for hosts and guests are incredibly rare. When we are made aware of issues, we work fast to help take care of our community and help make things right.’
But a month later, Rob’s profile is still on Airbnb. Thankfully, anyone who checks him out will see my one-star review in which I listed the wreckage (his review of me was: ‘Great’).
And I’m not the only one I know to have had problems. An acquaintance was recently awarded £6,000 compensation by the site after drug dealers partied in her London flat and she had to redecorate.
Despite having called in the police, she hasn’t been put off using Airbnb, though she says she will listen to her instinct more carefully in future if someone seems ‘off ’. How I wish I’d listened to my instinct when I read Rob’s abrupt messages.
My husband and I recently discussed braving Airbnb again but Phil thinks it’s not worth it.
And every time I remember the look on my daughter’s face when she saw her broken doll’s cradle, I think he’s right.
My little girl’s doll’s cradle was smashed to bits