The 100-year-old oak fell on the first day of the holiday. It crashed on to the terrace where James and his partner, Andrew, had been breakfasting minutes earlier, smashing the table and chairs and crushing the windscreen of their hire car.
The Airbnb cottage in Provence, France, was engulfed by the branches that broke the living room window and damaged the roof. “I was sure the ceiling was going to come in,” says James. “If it had fallen minutes earlier we would have been seriously injured or killed.”
It took a day for the host to winch the tree off the cottage and make emergency repairs, but the traumatised couple feared the property may be structurally unsound and decided to book into a hotel for the rest of their week’s holiday.
Airbnb was unperturbed. “We understand this may have caused some inconvenience to you,” it wrote in the first of many identical AI-generated messages before closing the unresolved case with a cheery “Keep safe. Stay healthy.”
The host was unperturbed too. “All that happened to you was that you heard a loud noise and saw a tree lying on the terrace,” she said in a reply to the couple’s request for a refund. “You have chosen to remember the worry and trauma instead of celebrating a unique memory.”
Now the summer season has ended, the holiday horror stories are flooding in to Guardian Money.
Unlucky travellers are reporting being locked in or out of their accommodation – if it existed or left stranded at night in strange cities if it did not. There are tales of filthy bedrooms, unsafe equipment and illegal sublets. One factor unites these ruined holidays: they were booked via online booking platforms, which refused a refund.
The growth of sites such as Airbnb and Booking.com has prompted a rise in travellers putting together their own holidays. The companies pour the world’s property portfolio on to a website and promise to sate wanderlust on a budget.
Consumer protections have not caught up with their popularity, however.
Package-deal customers have legal recourse for holiday nightmares under the Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements, but those who book accommodation via third-party platforms will find themselves at the mercy of their host.
Some platforms advertise additional protections, but your contract is with the person or company providing the accommodation.
James and Andrew had paid £931 for their week in the Provençal cottage and when they felt too unsafe to return ended up forking out twice that for a hotel. They are yet to hear whether they are liable for the damaged hire car. Despite its AirCover pledge to refund customers if there is a serious problem with a rental, Airbnb declared it was up to the host to agree a refund; the host claimed the decision was Airbnb’s.
After 10 weeks of identikit auto-generated messages in response to James’s complaint, Airbnb declared the case had gone on long enough and summarily closed it. The host concluded that since the repairs had cost her €5,000 (£4,350), she would not be stumping up a refund either. She suggested that instead the couple celebrate their survival and “turn the event into a beautiful story”.
Airbnb issued a full refund along with a £500 voucher after we questioned its health and safety policies. A spokesperson says: “We apologise for the original handling of this case, which falls short of our usual high standards. We will be reviewing this internally.”
Trapped
Kim Pocock used Booking.com to book a flat for a two-night stay in Barcelona. She and her daughter were left trapped in the property for most of their only full day in the city after a security lock on the front door malfunctioned.
“The host sent out a maintenance man, who was unable to help,” she says. “They eventually dispatched a locksmith who tried for several hours to access the lock from the outside. He had to buy a rope, which he threw up to our window and we hoisted up a wrench and pliers. With us levering the lock from the inside and the locksmith banging it from the outside, we finally managed to remove it. It turned out loose screws had blocked the mechanism. By then it was nearly 4pm.”
Pocock requested a full refund to compensate her for the ruined trip and the stress. Booking.com said this was at the discretion of the host. The host not only refused, it withheld her €250 deposit to pay for the replacement lock. The deposit was eventually returned by Booking.com but Pocock felt she was due the €446 rental cost.
“We would have been at serious risk if there had been an emergency while we were trapped, yet the host is blaming us for using the lock,” she says.
Another Booking.com customer Philip (surname withheld) was trapped outside the London flat he booked for £70 when, on trying to check in, he found the key safe empty. The owners told him they were abroad and could not help and advised him to find somewhere else for the night. He spent an extra £123 on a hotel room and has spent the intervening four months trying in vain to get this refunded.
“Booking.com have basically said that as the owner isn’t responding to them there’s nothing they can do,” he says. “I can’t comprehend how a business is able to operate this way with no accountability. The extra sting in the tail is that the property in question is still being advertised on the platform.”
Booking.com refunded both customers after Guardian Money intervened. The platform confirmed the host who had left Philip locked out of his rental had failed to respond to its inquiries. When asked why unscrupulous accommodation providers were not delisted, it said customers should review guest feedback to ensure a property was “the right fit”.
Reviews do not always tell the whole story. A report last year by the consumer group Which? highlighted that Booking.com’s default system was displaying reviews it considered “relevant”. This means that it is easy for users to miss a recent deluge of reviews warning that a listing is a scam or not available.
Booking.com countered that customers could easily sort reviews by the most recent or lowest score so as to make their own decision on a property.
The same Which? report claimed that listings that had been repeatedly reported as scams were not removed. Booking.com responded that it relied on hosts to abide by its terms and conditions and ensure that availability was up to date.
Grey area
The problem for travellers who do not get what they paid for is that their contract is with the accommodation provider not the booking platform.
Airbnb and Booking.com promise to help find alternative accommodation in an emergency, but getting compensation for a disrupted stay is a tougher battle. Both tend to rely on the owner to do the right thing.
The sector needs greater regulation, according to the consumer campaigner and journalist Martyn James. “Because online platforms effectively police themselves, the only course of action if the dispute isn’t resolved is legal action,” James says. “But who against? As the contract is between you and the host you’d have to take legal action in their country.”
He adds: “You could argue that the online marketplace failed to investigate your complaint properly and try to pursue them, but this is a grey area, legally. Both firms are registered overseas and have deep pockets.”
The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) says the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which came into force in April, requires online platforms to “exercise professional diligence” in relation to consumer transactions promoted or made on their platforms.
A DBT spokesperson says: “This government is on the side of consumers and we have brought into force tough new financial penalties for breaches of consumer law to protect people’s cash.”
They added: “Companies selling services to UK consumers must comply with UK law, and we have bolstered the Competition and Markets Authority’s powers to make sure they face severe penalties if they do not.”
