[yardie]

You place far too much faith in AirBnB's customer service line. I've called it before. I've sat outside the apartment I rented waiting on hold listening to the same 3 damn songs forever (hey did you know the music they've selected is produced by their employees?).

AirBnB wasn't reachable when I needed them the most. Sitting on the curb with my wife and 4yo at 10PM without a place to go. Trying desperately to find any hotel with a vacancy at the height of tourist season in a small tourist town.

That incident has soured my wife on me ever booking a sharing economy rental again.

[59nadir]

> AirBnB wasn't reachable when I needed them the most. Sitting on the curb with my wife and 4yo at 10PM without a place to go.

There is literally no way I would trust some random schmo on a site that enables idiots to try to run hotels with the wellbeing of a child, much less a 4 year old. Book a real hotel, honestly. Even if it went well, the bad judgment on display here is slightly disturbing.

[mikeash]

I'm not placing any faith in AirBnB. I laid out a chain of actions, one of which is contacting AirBnB, and the next link in the chain is what to do if that doesn't work.

No doubt you can get stuck in a crappy situation here. But you certainly have choices that don't involve doing nothing while your host carts you off to some undisclosed location.

[yardie]

I apologise. When I've retold the story other peoples' responses are simply "contact AirBnB" as if that wasn't the first thing we did. We eventually found a place for the night, resolved the issue with AirBnB (though weeks later), and promised to do a little more forethought into our next rental.

[mikeash]

That's OK, and I'm glad you got your housing trouble figured out. AirBnB definitely should be prepared to handle problems like this right away, but I can't say I'm too surprised that they don't.