Tag Archives for airbnb.
Marriott hotels keep quietly selling rooms on Airbnb—often hundreds of dollars cheaper than Marriott.com—despite corporate efforts to stop the practice. Here’s how to snag these secret deals.
The San Francisco Housing Authority is offering people $5,000 Airbnb gift cards to leave public housing and squat in private homes instead.
When you make a booking for a hotel you get an instant confirmation. Airbnb’s are not so simple. You often request the stay, and the owner has to confirm it. They may reject you for any reason or no reason.
Airbnb is contemplating a loyalty program – rejecting points in favor of a subscription model akin to Amazon Prime, reflecting CEO Brian Chesky’s belief that a paid membership could better monetize the platform’s top customers without the downsides he associates with conventional loyalty schemes.
Marriott Homes & Villas is a place to book homesharing stays. They aren’t a platform like Airbnb, where owners list directly. Instead they source inventory from other platforms like Vacasa, earn a commission, and rebate part of that back to you.
They’re celebrating their fifth anniversary and have a pretty great offer for Marriott elites: 50,000 bonus points…
Marriott has their booking platform for short-term rental stays. They rebate part of the commission they’re generating in the form of points and elite credit. Hyatt is getting into this game as well.
Capital One now has an interesting play in the space. You can already redeem Capital One Venture and Venture X (and equivalent business card) points to pay for short-term rental stays (such as Airbnb). But they’ve got their own STR ‘collections’ now that come with enhanced earning and benefits.
Shawn Mackey filed a lawsuit against his Airbnb “superhost” Pamela Fohler and the platform for privacy invasion, emotional distress, and marital damage after a contentious stay and an alleged extortion attempt involving a photo taken by a doorbell camera.
M. L. Rio, in a series of tweets on January 9, recounted a disastrous Airbnb rental experience. They’d booked a month-long stay but the place was infested with roaches. The stove malfunctioned. The door didn’t stay locked. And Airbnb wouldn’t help, telling them to pound sand. And that’s after numerous hours on hold with customer service, who even told them they’d get a refund if they moved out within a couple of hours, which they did – despite a broken ankle, which complicated getting in and out of a third-floor walk-up with a month’s worth of belongings.
The man behind 10,000 fake Airbnb bookings has been charged with wire fraud and identity theft. On his website he posing on yachts and declares himself a “visionary” who has “integrated AI” into his “daily grind.” Here’s what, in fact, he appears to have done.
Airbnb hosts are employing scams where they extort additional money from guests after their stay, often backed by staged evidence and usually following positive reviews left by the guests. To counter such deceit, guests are advised to take videos and photos of their accommodations before checking out, as these recordings can serve as evidence in disputes, even though they are not foolproof.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
