I thought I should share what I learnt from the situation and things to look out for if you are booking such accommodation.
First of all I will outline what happened.
I booked a 2 night stay in Doboj, Bosnia and Herzegovina, more as a stop-over between Croatia to Sarajevo, as I didn’t want to do a long bus journey. I booked the airbnb some months ago and nearer the time I checked to see how far it was from the bus-station and found it was a 20 minute walk – a bit too far for me with a suitcase and backpack etc.
So I messaged the host to ask if there was a bus to his place or how much a taxi should be. He offered to pick me up.
Great and I thought no more about it. I arrived at the bus station 20 minutes early and hung around for him … I can’t contact him as there is no wifi there and I don’t have a sim card for Bosnia. But he arrives on time and takes me to the apartment in 2 minutes. I was puzzled because I could still see the bus station when we arrived, (I could have walked instead of waiting the 20 minutes) but I assumed google maps was wrong or something and it was a nice modern apartment in a newly built block …
It’s early evening and although I am really tired, I decided I needed to get some Bosnian currency and some breakfast things and maybe go for a meal. It was still daylight when I left the apartment, but by the time I leave the supermarket – it’s dark. I ditch the meal as I have bought a large bottle of water which is quite heavy, so I use google maps to find my way back to the digs and it takes me in the opposite direction from where I have come from. No problem – perhaps just going around in a circle.
I get to the address of the apartment and it’s not the entrance I came out of. My fob key doesn’t work …. maybe it’s the back entrance – no. I am truly puzzled – and then it dawns on me that I am not staying in the listed apartment and I have no idea where my place is!
I message the host and he confirms this and sends me a link to the actual apartment I am in, a good 20 minutes’ walk away. Then he offers to pick me up which I accept, so apart from the inconvenience there was no harm done.
But there are a few “what-ifs” for me. What if he hadn’t answered my message, or if I had slept first and then gone for a few drinks and found this out at 2am … Then again, it hasn’t really affected me in anyway.
Is it worth making a fuss about?
I was back to the flat I was staying in, got the address and the directions from him and when I next left there, I took a photo of the entrance and was very clear about remembering my route back. The flat was situated very close to the centre (2 minutes’ walk) the bus station (same) and the (sadly, hardly used) railway station. But there are obvious lessons to be learned here.
This wasn’t a typical “bait and switch” operation, which is where a fake listing is made. The listing looks great, but the actual accommodation is somewhat lacking. In this case the accommodation was lovely, although it did lack amenities and would have not been suitable for a longer stay.
Bait and switch is much more worrying and is more likely to happen when listings are made by companies who are buying up properties just to let on Airbnb. I always try to rent from people who only have one or two listings on the site, but I seem to remember that this was difficult in Doboj as a few individuals seemed to have everything sewn up in the area.
This host had just the two, neither of which were where I was staying, so obviously he is in the process of building his empire. To some extent I don’t have a problem with this. People need to make a living and doing a good job in hosting travellers seems positive, but at some point the amount of listings will become more than a person or a family can handle and that is where I would be wary. Rental companies can use Airbnb (and similar platforms) as a way of gaining money from a subdued, long-term rental market and make it difficult for local people to find anywhere. This is most obviously played out in tourist locations where finding somewhere to stay is difficult but where people still need to live. Other blogs and websites have written about localised problems such as the gentrification of areas and I don’t think I have much to add to the debate. I have not been able to find a suitable alternative for my needs and as I don’t have a home of my own (so am not leaving a property empty whilst I am on my journey) I don’t feel as if I am adding to a housing crisis, though I am aware that others may disagree.
There is a website Inside Airbnb which is trying to analyse the impact that Airbnb has on certain cities. I used this to look at somewhere I am travelling to soon but have not yet searched for – Thessaloniki in Greece. Here I can see that there are 3712 places to stay and 97% of those are complete apartments (not sharing.) The city does have a licencing policy and 93% of listings are complying with this. Of the hosts with multiple listings, I can see that someone called Nilie is far out in front with 226 separate listings with the Luxury Suites coming in second place with 128. These would be red flags to me – not just because of the impact owning so many properties must have on the local community, but also that the risks of bait and switch and other similar scams would be higher. I will be doing a search for accommodation in the city in the next few weeks (I plan to stay for a month in February, hardly peak season!) and will outline my search strategy and how I come to choose a place to stay in a future post.
I do hope that this post has been useful to people who may wish to book with Airbnb, in order to know some things to look out for. In short my suggestions would be as follows:
1. Try to book with hosts who have only one or two listings – as they are more likely to be in this for extra income and not as a commercial business.
2. Try not to book with hosts that have few or no reviews – although all have to start somewhere – often the new reviews can be cancelled at short notice leaving people high and dry.
3. Check the reviews thoroughly, notice what is not said as well as what is said. If they have very few reviews, you may want to check if the reviews seem genuine, all reviewers have bio pages as well, see if they have other reviews and that there are a mix of countries involved (i.e. not all the reviews come from the same country as the host.)
4. Take photographs of the entrance to where you are staying and some of the rooms. Also make a note of the address, if things seem different to the listing, query it with the host and if you are still uncomfortable, contact Airbnb immediately.
5. Notice if the reviews mention the host going the extra mile for guests. Hosts who leave homemade cakes or take people out on excursions are much less likely to be commercial operators who don’t really care about their renters apart from their wallets. I would have included hosts who pick up guests from bus stations etc. but then …
This is not a complete list of things to do and I would be happy to hear from anyone who has other ideas, please comment below.
But please don’t leave your accommodation to go on a night out, without checking you know exactly where you are sleeping at night. Otherwise it might be on the street.
