Same thing happened to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32194057

Before then I didn't know AirBnb was moderating bad reviews in such an aggressive way. Good reviews mean nothing if all the bad ones are automatically taken down. It's ridiculous, and made me very wary of ever booking again with them.

(There's an interview of Bezos somewhere where he explains that when starting Amazon, publishing houses were complaining to him about the bad book reviews, and he told them something to the effect of: it's because we let bad reviews up that people trust us. Obviously things have changed and Amazon reviews aren't what they used to be, but still. Bezos in 1997 understood something that AirBnb fails to grasp.)

Few weeks after that I receive racist messages from the host on my personal cellphone. I am shocked Airbnb would share my personal details just like that. I reported it to Airbnb, but they were pretty clueless as this was happening outside their messaging system. I finally had to share screenshots of the text messages, and they said they will take down the hosts account. They did for sometime, but after a couple of months that host's account is still live and his place is still accepting reservations. My review has been taken down though.

The worst for me was a hotel in Paris I booked via Booking.com. It was completely different from the announced, and had several issues, such as having an outside bathroom without a lockable door. Luckily it closed during the pandemic.

Booking.com not only fought tooth and nail to charge me, claiming to my credit card that I needed to be charged since I "actually stayed at the hotel", but they then deleted my review claiming that "I didn't stay at the hotel". The key to getting a chargeback was sending the email of the deleted review to the credit card company.

Today I just search using Booking.com but make reservations via phone.

The problem is not AirBnB or Booking.com. The problem is "internet companies". They all suck.

If you book with one of the booking agencies (I will not name the two that I used), the hotel will often give you one of these rooms, off the bat. You can complain, and they'll get you another one, but that is not something that you want to do, when you just checked in at 11PM, and your first meeting is at 8AM, the next morning.

BTW: Hotels are not supposed to do that, but they do, anyway. It's hard to prove.

[1] Bad as in little or no natural lighting, unusually small, etc. Some of the time a tall big city hotel abuts other buildings and has a lightwell and, especially on the lower floors, things can be pretty dark.

[1] That's because if the front-desk guy/gal has any agency in this, they will absolutely not try to put a Karen into a bad room. Because they don't want to deal with his/her freakout over the noise of the vending machine, or the elevator, or some other factor that they can't control, but will get the guest to complain to management.

However, if you search the English alphabet for the letters between "N" and "Q," you are likely to find the first letter of the name of each booking service (not hotel).

I've used AirBnB only once exactly for these reasons. That uncertainty is killer when I'm gonna be staying in a city where I don't know anyone who lives there and can help me get out of a jam. There's a piece of mind to getting a hotel and knowing for sure that I will have somewhere to stay. If something goes wrong, there's a company policy I can review that has explicit steps for recourse.