[anupmm]

We traveled to Japan for 3 weeks and used Airbnb exclusively. 2 out of the 4 places we visited were sub par. While the images and the reviews made us believe that we were getting an awesome place, reality was starkly different. In one of the places we left in the middle of the night with a 1 year old in tow! The bugs, general cleanliness of the place, lack of AC got to us. Airbnb CSR was not cooperative at all saying, despite me juggling between international calls/messages and we lost the full fee for 3 days. Because we didn't give the host a chance to fix the issue, a situation we thought couldn't be fixed. Mind you we spent ~$5K with Airbnb on that trip alone. Though I live in the Bay Area and have friends working at the company, I was done. I will stick to hotels unless Airbnb develops better mechanisms to handle these situations or builds consumer friendliness into its ethos.