Consider seeing in small claims court (if the money you are out fits under your local small claims cap). Print out all the communications you have, but esp. any of both the AirBnB CS rep saying you got a raw deal, and any of the original host kicking you out.
Most of the time non-local companies don’t send anyone to small claims court. That is not normally an automatic win, but it does tend to mean if you have any even flimsy evidence you have a great chance of a win.
The downside is it will take you a trip to the courthouse, and a conversation with a clerk (they are normally very helpful), and a bunch of paperwork to file (say 2 hours plus travel time here). You do get the power of discovery, so you can try to compile AirBnB to turn over any and all records of your case, but they may well claim they don’t retain them, or make up a BS excuse here. Also that takes you time, but can sometimes be fun. You will also need to go to small claims court when your case comes up for trial, that will be basically a day (most of it other cases, but they don’t tell you “Nov 15th at 3:30pm” they tell you “Nov 15th”).
For $1k+ it is probably worth it.
Well, in non COVID times it would be, it might still be. Depending.
(note: this is assuming the USA legal system, if you are in another country to Louisiana I have no idea how it works, also I’m not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, this is someone who took a law class in high school in a another century and has been to small claims like twice max…so take this with a giant grain of pink salt)
about one-third of Airbnb properties are owned by hosts who manage at least 25 properties
Holy shit, really? So 1/3 airbnb listings are “corporate”? (if you own 25 properties, you are a corporation, I don’t care what you say).
That blows my mind, and makes me even more sure that airbnb is basically a tool to raise rent and consume supply on vacancies. As a renter myself, I can’t even.
Yeah a lot of New Yorkers seem to have off booted points south. Largely in an attempt to avoid restrictions/quarantines. The other thing they did was rush out to tourist areas initially to bunker up, and then because they thought they could ignore restrictions in sufficiently out of the way places.
Here in Eastern Long Island the short term rental rates have been 4x normal since the shelter in place order came down. When things were bad here it was mostly well off city residents running to the beach town. While the well off people here headed to Florida and rented out their homes. This left us with the highest per capita infection rate nationwide for most of April.
Now that Florida et al can’t avoid clamping down those people are flooding back to a newly loosened NY. Basically seems to be people with money and multiple homes juggling their location to follow where things are “open”.
Along with that has come a flood of people from practically every state with a nasty outbreak. I’ve passed a good 20 cars from Texas already this week. People from Texas don’t ordinarily vacation here, and people here don’t ordinarily have second homes in Texas. And it’s definitely weird to have people road tripping 2000 miles in a Maserati.
I’d say that Airbnb and the like are platforms that not only reduce available living spaces but they actively create vacancies. There are many stories of landlords kicking tenants out when they find out they can make more money with short term rentals, remodeling the unit and put it on Airbnb. It reminds to me some extent of the luxury properties in many cities that exist solely to move money around and not to actually house people.
