Blackcap Blog

Published at 16:01 on 27 October 2021

Executive summary: Avoid Airbnb like the plague. Pretty much everything about them sucks.

So, about a week and a half ago, I thought I wanted to reserve a room for a few nights in Vancouver, BC to do some apartment hunting. I decided to check out what was available on Airbnb.

The first thing that happened was the site was almost totally unusable. It is one of those piece of junk web sites that is crammed full of as much badly-written client-side Javascript as possible. I’m sure the site works fine on the high-end gigabit connection at the office where the testing is done. Problem is, not everyone has a high-speed, high-end connection, and the site is so heavy with hidden (and sometimes excruciatingly slow) requests to their servers, without any user feedback that this is happening, that the site is virtually useless on a slow connection.

So I wait half an hour and the site becomes barely usable. I manage to find what looks like a very attractive deal; apparently someone cancelled at the last minute and something desirable is available at a competitive price. I try to reserve it, and at one stage it drops back into two-factor authentication and asks for a cell number to text. I enter my number and receive no text. I try a few more times, then a message comes up that Airbnb is now blocking texts to that number for 24 hours.

So I wait 30 hours, and by some miracle the good deal is still there. I try again, only to discover my number is still blocked. So I borrow a friend’s phone and attempt to use it for two-factor authentication. The first text takes forever to get delivered, so long that I have given up and tried again. That second try causes Airbnb to proudly proclaim it is now blocking texts to my friend’s number as well.

At that point, I write off Airbnb entirely, and give up in disgust.

But Airbnb was not done imposing its suckiness on me. At one stage in that process, it did ask for a credit card number. It turns out that Airbnb, despite pestering me with two-factor authentication and refusing to complete my transaction, did nonetheless try to bill my credit card at that point… from the United Kingdom. Why a San Francisco-based company would instigate a charge from the UK for a sublet in Vancouver, BC is beyond me, but that is exactly what Airbnb did. Seeing a charge from the UK come within mere hours of a charge from Canada, my credit union then decided to cancel that credit card.

When I called my credit union to ask why charges were suddenly failing, they did some investigating, and their reaction was “Oh, Airbnb. They tried to charge you from the UK. We run into this sort of thing often with them. We advise our clients always call us before using Airbnb to stop their credit cards from being cancelled.”

So now I must wait for a new credit card to arrive before I make my next trip north. Fuck you very much, Airbnb.