Ghattas E.

My partner and I booked a place on Airbnb ealry March before COVID-19 for November 2020. We had booked this place for guests that were coming from abroad. My partner did the booking under her account.
Come October, the people who were coming are no longer traveling due to the COVID pandemic. On top of this, the people who are running the place were very unresponsive and unprofessional, telling us that they will call back and never do and then go as far as saying that they contacted the other partner when they did not. The final straw for this location was when a most recent review of the place claimed that the place was UNINHABITABLE and that they got their full refund.
We contacted Airbnb to get a full refund and of course we had to call 4 times between dealing with incompetent customer service individuals, or having the line "mysteriously" get cut off. After finally getting through to explain all of the above issues, here was their conclusion:
1- since the booking is under my partner's name, then they cannot give a full refund based on the COVID-19 policy since it is our guests who are not coming (because it makes sense that we booked a 9 room airbnb for only herself right?). On top of this, they are requesting that travelers have official restrictions from the US government knowing that most countries don't have that entry restriction.
2- They did not even address the bad communication and unprofessional behavior of the managers of the location.
3- When it came to the UNINHABITABLE review of the location they said that we need to have proof of it and since it is someone else's experience they wont do anything about it.
Airbnb did not do ANYTHING about a review saying that the place was uninhabitable during a pandemic. They basically wanted us to go there and get pictures on our own booked time. So they want to put us at risk, take the trip to a location that is possibly UNSAFE to be in in order to get a refund. You would expect a more thorough investigation over a possible health hazard like this.
Airbnb is just a third party money making machine that holds no accountability to the places that they allow on their websites. BE careful booking with this place.