Why AirBnB will never be considered a solution for the Corporate traveler.

Why AirBnB will never be considered a solution for the Corporate traveler.

I was attending a conference recently and sat through a presentation about corporate traveling – you know, the guys and gals that jump on an airplane and travel somewhere, stay in a hotel, and make the best of travel points as much as they can.  Unfortunately I didn’t have time to chime in with how AirBnB is never going to be used for Corporate travelers.

In the world of travel rewards, AirBnB is definitely screwing their customers.

Here’s how they are scamming their customers, one at a time.  For a company that is looking at an IPO in 2019, you would think they would not be behaving badly, but that is exactly what they are doing.

AirBnB has gift cards for sale at major retailers everywhere.  Five hundred dollar gift cards can be purchased and applied to the traveler’s AirBnB account, only they do their best to keep you from using them!

Here is how their racket works.  You have an upcoming trip, and you go buy a $500 gift card (or multiple cards) at your favorite retailer so you get whatever travel rewards you are looking for.  Then you apply the gift card and make your reservation, using the money you just applied to your AirBnB account.  Easy peasy, right? Wrong.

I will walk you through their scam, step by step, to help you NOT get scammed by them.  First, you have to have an AirBnB account and you had to associate your credit card with that account when you made it.  Next step, you go search for a trip you want to take.  Here is an example of a trip I want to take on April Fool’s Day – only this time, I am not going to get scammed again.

Now that we have found the trip we want to take (and not be April Fooled) we click on the “Book” button, since we “won’t be charged yet"

Everything looks okay, right?  Wrong.  Well, wait just a minute – I see they are charging half of my trip as expected, and it is being taken out of my gift card/credit balance.  What’s wrong with that, you say?

Look at the “Due on Mar 19, 2019 = $351.68” line.  Nothing out of the ordinary, there, right?  Wrong.

Click on that little question mark – we will go do that now…

Oh, what does that mean?  It’s not exactly clear now, is it?  Here’s how their scam works.   You click next and they charge half of your trip (as expected, because these are people renting their homes out to people) to your gift card balance.  But what they are NOT telling you is that on March 19^th, they are NOT going to charge the other half to your AirBnB balance.  Nope.  They aren’t.  They are going to charge it to your credit card – you know, the one you set up your AirBnB account with.

So, if you bought a five hundred dollar gift card for that trip three weeks out, when you click on book, they are going to take half cost of your trip out of your AirBnB balance.  When it comes to paying for the other half, they are going to charge your credit card, leaving you with a balance in your AirBnB account.

At first, you might think this is a simple “bad design” of their website.  If you start googling around, you will find that AirBnB Customers have been getting scammed for three years this way.  They buy a gift card for themselves or someone else, and apply it to their trip, only to get the second half of their trip charged to their credit card. 

After this happens to you, you search for a phone number or email address on their website, to no avail.  Sure, you see this icon on their website, but you cannot click on it.  Conveniently, there is no phone number or email address anywhere on there on how to “contact us”.

Next, you do what anyone else would do.  You google until you find a link to click on (not from their website) and you get in a chat session.  After explaining to the person on the other end of the chat what the problem is, they send you several non-related links to other problems, but not to what you want to do – which is to charge the rest of your trip to your gift card balance.  Next, you google around and find the phone number to call, and that brings you to a person.  Ahhh.  Finally, a real person, right?  This person then tells you what you want to do is NOT possible.  You can only book the first half of your trip to your gift card balance, and the second half goes on your credit card.  Now why is that?   Well, the solution is easy.  AirBnB has figured out that they can sit on your money as long as it takes you to find another trip to book.  If you aren’t going to take a trip for six months, well, it sucks to be you.  They now have your money in their bank for six months, until you decide to use it.

You ask to speak to a supervisor, and then that happens.  The supervisor tells you the same thing.  He apologizes and says there is nothing they can do, and that your feedback is welcome.  They make it sound like they are going to do something about it, right?  Wrong.  We are nearing the end of February 2019.  A quick google search finds that this little scam they have going has been in the works for YEARS.  Yes, years.  Here is a link from their own website telling you why NOT to buy gift cards from AirBnB:  https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Help/Reasons-NOT-to-buy-gift-card-for-Airbnb/td-p/570579

Wow.  That was two years ago.  You would think that if this was an oversight on AirBnB’s behalf, they would have fixed it by now.

Now we know how billionaires make their money.  The create companies and then rip off their customers, and then drive around in their fancy cars and pretend they are better than everyone else.

Wouldn’t you love to know how much money is tied up in AirBnB’s coffer, never to be spent on trips because unknowing customers innocently buy gift cards for their loved ones, or you want to go on a corporate trip and not stay in the same old hotel chain and then discover there’s no way to unlock your money.

Shame on you, Brian.  Shame on you.  Maybe we should retitle that “100 most dishonest people of 2015”