This superhost seems to have had a temporally bonkers moment with the calendar but behaved in a totally unacceptable way leaving the guest’s stuff (including passport!) out on the street and yet… amazingly abb appear to have initially fully supported her behaviour which I find very strange. Is there anyone on the forum from Washington DC with more local detail on the story?
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Horrible! I’m glad I block days in between to allow myself extra cleaning time. So if I did mess up with dates, there is some wiggle room. The host in this article should get kicked off the platform for the way she treated her guest. It was totally unacceptable, especially when it was her mistake. She’s not a superhost, she’s a superhorror.
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Yes I agree, bit of a rum do all round. Yet I have to say that the guest seems remarkably mild-mannered about the whole affair, questioning the “service fee” rather than demanding that the host gets some sort of comeuppance.
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Rum it definitely is. Although I tend to be a bit of a Pollyanna-everything-is-lovely person I can also be a little suspicious when I see stories like that.
It just seems like a made-up story to me. It’s as if the writer had instructions to write some drivel about Airbnb.
Would a host really chuck a guest’s possessions out like that? Did the host really not contact the guest on the day before checkout reminding them about times for leaving?
Does the guest truly not realise that the service fee is an admin fee for the introduction to the host, the credit card handling, and the general management of finding and booking a place, rather than some sort of helpdesk? Does the guest really have no travel insurance to guard against problems?
We’re only reading one side of the story.
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The writer has a column in the Guardian called “Your Problems” where people write in about an issue they are having and she posts some response. So anyone could make up anything, because as far as I can tell, this “journalist” does a bit of investigation as far as talking to the entity that is being accused of poor customer treatment, but certainly in this case she only focused on how Airbnb handled the case, without even verifying if the guest’s version of events was true. She just seems to take everyone’s story at face value.
However, I have to say that there are some very weird hosts out there who in fact do totally unacceptable or nutso things. I remember a thread on the Airbnb CC started by a homeshare host who not only had a curfew of 9 pm for guests to come home at night, and they had to tiptoe around after that time because he had to get up early for work, but insisted that it was his right to enter the guest rooms on a daily basis when the guests were out to turn off lights, turn off the heat and “inspect” the room, even moving guests’ belongings if he didn’t like where they had placed them.
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There are probably as many nutjob hosts as there are guests. 
I do suspect though that there are some guests (and probably some hosts too) who don’t fully understand what Airbnb is.
They don’t realise that the company is basically an advertising platform and credit card handler.
Guests don’t always realise that we don’t work for Airbnb and that we are all individual hosts working for our own businesses.
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