Can you trust airbnb

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Weekend Getaways. Air Travel. Business Travel. Packing Tips. The Future of Travel. Travel Etiquette. Let someone else take the risk to help that listing start getting their first reviews, meanwhile, you should stay in a place that has been vetted by many other renters. Because we spend SO much time looking through listings, pictures, reviews, and messaging hosts!

It would be a complete waste of our time if we had to go back and start all over. While looking at the list of amenities on Airbnb , you might be tempted to check a bunch of them! Shampoo, dryer, breakfast?! It sounds amazing, but the truth is that if you check all of those you might not find a place that is in your budget.

Or even worse, you might not find one at all! Why is that? If the number of listings is still pretty low or way above your price range, then look at the number of days you are going to be there. I wrote out 5 tips guaranteed to save you money in Europe and this was one of them!

You can make that without a kitchen and then go out for dinner. Okay, this one is for those of us who really like to save money ME!! So before you even start looking for a place on Airbnb, start researching how much it is going to cost you to get around the city. Depending on how much you like to walk, you can calculate which pass you plan to buy and how much that will cost you daily.

So back to our scenario. We pay less in Airbnb payments than in rent in the USA. Can you believe that? If you pay in cash, just bear in mind that if anything goes wrong, Airbnb will not assist you as your booking will technically have ended and the extension is now a private matter between you and the host.

Of course, you also need to ask yourself whether you want to enable potential tax avoidance…. Have you ever had an Airbnb host cancel on you? There are many reasons why a host would need to cancel. The scam works like this: they list a property as available for X amount of money and you book it well in advance.

Unbeknown to you, they then re-list the property for the same dates and for a higher amount. In other cases, they will also list it on a few other Airbnb alternatives. Airbnb is very slack about this one and their policy allows hosts to cancel 3 times in a year with neither reason nor enquiry. Go figure! I battled a seriously nasty infection that snaked up past my knee and by the time I made it to a local hospital they wanted to amputate.

I was delirious, unable to walk, and in a lot of pain but I managed to call my insurance provider — they moved me to a much better private hospital where the doctors were able to save my leg.

Moral of the story: consider getting travel insurance before you head out into the wilds, people! None of us at The Broke Backpacker have ever experienced this one directly, but we know some of you have. This is designed to protect hosts from bad guests, and they bill it right to your card.

Unfortunately, this is sometimes abused by hosts who claim fake damages and try to get an extra charge out of you. The host even apologized for it at check-in! A twist on this Airbnb scam is overcharging for legitimate damages. If anything is broken or damaged when you arrive, make a note for, take photos and message the host straight away. The good news is that Airbnb does have a tendency to side with guests over hosts, and may even stand disputed damages themselves to avoid bigger trouble on their side.

You would assume there will be plates and knives for you to use in said kitchen, right? And even charges for toilet rolls at check-out!

You should simply refuse to pay and insist that the host gives you everything you need. And the same goes for any amenities that are already in the house, like toilet paper. Unless you happen to have a particularly shitty arse, in which case you should cover any extras you buy. It may get tense, but stand your ground and remind them that Airbnb will NOT take this kindly.

In almost all cases, it is desperate opportunism and will cave in pretty quickly. This next one is nothing short of ingenious in its scope and ambition. There have been cases of users making bookings and paying hefty fees through fake Airbnb-looking websites.

When they realise that the property is not available usually when they turn up , they angrily claim a refund via the real Airbnb. At this point, the victim realises they have been scammed by a criminal mastermind and that they made the booking through a fake, clone site and made the payment through a phoney terminal. From the anecdotal evidence out there, it seems that the scammers are trapping people via the REAL site. They advertise a property on Airbnb, guest initiates contact, and somewhere along the chain of communication in the Chat or Via an email the criminal slips in a link to the fake-site.

You should always be sceptical on the internet. You gotta stay safe online. Victims may allege that the perpetrator snared them via the real site, so it is actually their business in the end. And sort of by design — this is how it was meant to scale. I feel like these companies want to get as big as possible and as quickly as possible. Why, though, is it so important for these companies to reach scale? Facebook greatly benefits from that.

The more people that use it, the more people are going to continue using it over time. Part of that is maybe the nature of the business itself. For the past 15 or 20 years, that was a lauded approach to how we look at CEOs. Now that sort of view is becoming questioned in tech, which is in for this reckoning right now. He has more money than you will ever be able to spend. Or if you want to go, Steve Jobs, the dent in the universe thing.

It always exists. So it might be hard to hold the platforms to a percent standard of keeping everything pristine. To find out, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts , Stitcher , Spotify , or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.

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