Started By
Message

Worst Travel Experience

Posted on 6/21/17 at 10:54 pm
Posted by tduecen
Member since Nov 2006
161244 posts
Posted on 6/21/17 at 10:54 pm
So my most recent trip...
Stayed at an Airbnb for the trip...
Day 1 arrived late due to delays, had to book a hotel, landed in Portland, hotel had overbooked and cancelled me. Spent 40 minutes trying to find another.
Day 2- Perfect no complaint
Day 3- Airbnb host shows back up, owns two Newfoundland dogs. I'm in the crouched position petting one, other comes up quickly knocking me off balance. I grab a deal that is rigged and pull it down. Owner and I agree on a price for the items broke.
Day 4- I arrive back at Airbnb at 10 PM they have people over and continue to part till 2am. Talking isn't the issue but the yelling, up and down the stairs is.
Day 5- talk with Airbnb host about the previous night. Arrive back at 11pm again party this time 3am and they are running up and down the stairs (I'm in a basement apartment) I decided to leave and check into a hot
Day 6- I e-mail Airbnb host about me leaving and my reasoning, the host now says the stuff I the broke was valued at 1k after agreeing on a previous price.
Day 7- I co tact Airbnb with screen shots of everything they assure me I'm covered. Host then emails me asking for 1500 because she misvalued things.

Now Portland is an awesome city with a lot to do. I went hiking, did a lot of drinking, saw a lot of the mountains but my experience with my Airbnb host ruined it. I felt bad about what happened and offered a fair amount (double what I was paying for a week) and they agreed now it is a cluster frick.
Posted by hogfly
Fayetteville, AR
Member since May 2014
4656 posts
Posted on 6/21/17 at 11:17 pm to
Give a very clear review and rating on the site. This is part of what makes AirBNB work. It sucks that you're the canary in the coalmine, but that's part of the cost of using a crowdsource site like that.

My worst travel experience is really, really insane and hard to share.

Edit: I'm posting this in the vein of an author. I don't condone drug use. I have children now and I hope they don't do the stupid shite I did. That being said: stories need to be told. And this is one of mine.

I was visiting friends in DFW who I knew from church camp (haha). This was in the mid 90s. We went down to hang out with them and score some drugs, specifically psychedelics (LSD and MDMA). They had assured me that it would be no problem to score said drugs and return to our cozy abode in Fayetteville. But they also wanted us to party with them for an evening. So we did... by ingesting a few hits of LSD a piece. They, then, proceeded to ask their "friends" to come over, who were all clearly affiliated with the Mexican Mafia in some way. We ate more LSD and went to watch this great new movie that had come out in the theaters called, "True Romance." I don't know if you've seen this gem before... but Romance doesn't really figure into the actual script... but it was all too TRUE for me at that LSD-riddled moment. Basically, I construe an entire delusion that my friends are hooked up with the Mexican mafia and trying to set me up as a conduit for them. It gets worse when the movie is over (yes.. reality was actually worse than True Romance) because they start trying to convince us to do cocaine with them. Now.. I'm no prude and now consider cocaine to be sort of... mundane... but at the time it was verboten in my scene as we were all about the mind enhancing powers of psychedelics.

So in my drug addled state, the hispanic dudes make several comments that were probably completely innocuous. At the time, though, I was convinced that they were communicating to me that my friend from Dallas who I had gone on vacation to see (and amittedly procure drugs from) was a male prostitute for them (please god don't go Freudian and read too much into this... because I have already done it) and that these Mexican dudes were offering me cocaine to try to get me hooked on it as well and turn me into a prostitute.

Anyway... I didn't peddle my arse that night. We all went to sleep. I woke up and drove back to Arkansas. Problem resolved. But that was probably my worst traveling misadventure.
This post was edited on 6/22/17 at 11:31 pm
Posted by Barneyrb
NELA
Member since May 2016
5139 posts
Posted on 6/22/17 at 8:21 am to
quote:

Day 3- Airbnb host shows back up, owns two Newfoundland dogs. I'm in the crouched position petting one, other comes up quickly knocking me off balance. I grab a deal that is rigged and pull it down. Owner and I agree on a price for the items broke.


I'm sorry but if the owner's dog knocked you over and you were trying to catch yourself from falling and broke something you don't owe them a thing, the cause was an animal that the owner owns.

End of story for me
Posted by TheIndulger
Member since Sep 2011
19239 posts
Posted on 6/22/17 at 8:31 am to
Were you drunk when you wrote that?
Posted by Salmon
On the trails
Member since Feb 2008
83630 posts
Posted on 6/22/17 at 9:16 am to
quote:

Airbnb host shows back up, owns two Newfoundland dogs. I'm in the crouched position petting one, other comes up quickly knocking me off balance. I grab a deal that is rigged and pull it down. Owner and I agree on a price for the items broke.


wait...why would you pay for something that was caused by his own dog pushing you over?

and this is why you always book airBnBs as "entire house"


This post was edited on 6/22/17 at 9:17 am
Posted by hungryone
river parishes
Member since Sep 2010
11987 posts
Posted on 6/22/17 at 11:08 am to
I only do whole place rentals on AirBnB. (Side note: I really like ABB descriptions that emphasis that guests should be quiet, that a given building is quiet & unsuitable for parties. Those are always listings I consider.)

My worst was a trip to Guatemala a few years ago. It started on the United flight, where I ordered a ginger ale....and 20 minutes after drinking it, I began to develop a migraine. So I ordered another one....unbeknownst to me at the time, Seagram's took out some of the sugar in its non-diet ginger ale & replaced it with sucralose, yet did not label said soda as "diet". I drank two on the plane, leading to a full scale migraine. By the time we landed, I could barely walk, had visual distortions, and was in abject misery. (You don't realize how brightly lighted airports are until you stagger through one with a light-sensitive headache.)

So my friends pick us up at the airport & all I can do is lie down in the back seat. I manage to sit upright at dinner in a quaint open air restaurant....then I have to go back to their apt and lie down in the dark. We get up the next day & I still have about 25% of the headache from the day before, so we cancel our van ride to Chichicastenango and go to Antigua instead....piloted by a driver in a van that can't get out of second gear. We stop on the side of the road on the outskirts of Guatemala City so he can poke around under the hood, he calls his boss. Boss tells him to finish the trip and go see cousin Hector after he gets us to Antigua. The weather was nice, I was feeling a bit better, and the driver told interesting stories, so I'm thinking things are looking up, despite the snail's pace through the countryside.

Arrive in Antigua, check into the very pretty Quintana de las Flores, go out to lunch, go sightseeing, have a nice afternoon/evening. Day two is also fun, until I start feeling terribly dizzy from the altitude & faint in the courtyard of a hipster coffee house. Later that same day, we walk across town for dinner. I start feeling nauseous during the walk, flee to the restroom immediately upon arrival, and then must schlep back across town on foot while trying not to barf every three blocks. My better half decides I need to ride in a tuk-tuk.....with shot suspension over cobblestones, adding motion sickness to my traveler's stomach.

I spent the next two days lying on a chaise by the pool, with side trips to the toilet, while my fellow travelers hiked the volcanoes, visited a coffee plantation, etc. I just tried not to die of dehydration and admired the pretty flowers growing on the hotel grounds.

And my friends couldn't understand why we wouldn't return to see the Santa Semana celebrations....no thanks. No more Guatemala for me. Granted, the migraine wasn't brought on by Guate, but the altitude and unclean water nearly did me in. So I've scratched trekking thru Nepal off my list.
Posted by baldona
Florida
Member since Feb 2016
20514 posts
Posted on 6/22/17 at 2:52 pm to
So what was it you broke? I'm trying to remember if Airbnb includes insurance? I know vrbo offers it as an added expense. I'm trying to figure out why some shiteheads renting out a room would have something easily breakable worth $1000+?

Also, and I'm not saying this is right, but I've stayed in plenty of rentals with thin walls or otherwise crappy situations that were mostly out of the owners control. Pretty absurd for owners to do that though, what was their ratings? Was there any other complaints about that?
Posted by prostyleoffensetime
Mississippi
Member since Aug 2009
11460 posts
Posted on 6/23/17 at 12:33 pm to
What a convenient thread for me to find today... So, any time my wife's aunt is around, it turns into a shite show. She's loud, obnoxious, not funny, awkward, and it always has to be about accommodating her and all that bullshite "because she has no one else." It's happening right now as I sit here typing this. I'm the opposite, I like to have a good time, but I stay in my lane and just let things happen naturally, especially on vacation.

We're in Orange Beach for a long weekend and the way it was supposed to work was she and her friends stay in the main house and the wife and I take the guest house. That means most of the day to ourselves, come and go without interaction, privacy, a lot of fun sex, all the things a young couple with no children could dream of. Great...

Rant: [ON] Off

Nope. Of course, her friends flake out and say they're not coming, and god dammit, now she's alone crying about how her friends aren't coming. I mean, son of a bitch, you're a 60 year old single person. You should be used to shite not working out in the social department. Go buy a book and sit on the porch and watch the waves roll in. frick naw, that's too simple. Now my wife thinks she's gotta join us in every activity aside from the sex or she might kill herself from loneliness. And I'm just like she seems to not cut herself when she's alone at home, why would she do it here... I don't see the difference... Anyway, I guess I'm just going to let them leave and go pound some golf balls at the range for a bit.

I'll probably get down voted for the cold hearted opinions, but it's all good.

Rant: On [OFF]
Posted by tduecen
Member since Nov 2006
161244 posts
Posted on 7/26/17 at 8:35 am to
So it took a month but Airbnb has sided with me and making the host refund me for the days in which I had to get a hotel due to noise.

I'm content
Posted by HoustonGumbeauxGuy
Member since Jul 2011
29648 posts
Posted on 7/28/17 at 6:29 pm to
Tiger Air flight from Singapore to Bangkok. Plane was taped together and people were smoking and fighting at the back. No flight attendants.

Was preparing for death.
first pageprev pagePage 1 of 1Next pagelast page
refresh

Back to top
logoFollow TigerDroppings for LSU Football News
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to get the latest updates on LSU Football and Recruiting.

FacebookTwitterInstagram