True Traveler Stories: How are vacation rentals scammed these days?

Traveling abroad is not an easy task under current conditions. Problems arise either in finding a suitable route or in booking hotels and rental apartments. If you like the all-inclusive system on holiday, you can always ask for help from travel agencies and choose the option you want. However, problems can arise if you see yourself as a restless traveler who is always looking for adventure.

As practice shows, difficulties arise even at the stage of finding housing, because not all real estate booking sites can give a guarantee that the transaction will still occur.

I’ll tell you with an example: one of my friends flew to the Philippines this winter. And despite the fact that she and her boyfriend had booked a villa on one of the most famous sites to find short-term private housing, the address indicated was just rice fields. The landlord’s phone was no longer available by then, so they urgently had to change the route.

Unfortunately, such stories happen quite often, and it is almost impossible to predict whether you will be lucky with housing on vacation. In our new section, real travelers decided to talk about their unsuccessful vacation experience, both in Russia and abroad.

Irina, Beautiful

My girlfriends and I booked a four bedroom pool villa in Nice for a week. The host had a verified account with many reviews. But things didn’t go as planned when I got a confirmation email not from Airbnb but from the host’s email. He offered to transfer the deposit and one night’s fee as a guarantee for the reservation. They posted a payment link linked to the Airbnb website, supposedly they have a new payment system. We sent money to the scammer. The man is gone. The Airbnb office said they couldn’t help. It’s good that all this happened while we were in Moscow, not there. Yes, and the losses can be much more significant.

Victor, Ryazan

He was in Ryazan. We went there with friends last summer. We pre-booked accommodation through Avito and agreed on a fixed daily payment. However, when they arrived at the specified address, they could not find what they expected.

Looks like the same apartment as in the photo, same number of rooms but absolutely no furniture! It turns out that the landlord also sells all the furniture through Avito. And when we arrived, everything was already sold out, only the kitchen set remained. The owner of the apartment, laughing anxiously, simply said: “Gentlemen, I myself did not know that someone needed my furniture and that it would fall apart so quickly.” We just took it and left.

Christina, Paris

When we go to Europe, my mother and I usually rent apartments during the day. We like the idea of ​​staying at several hotels at once. I’m a frequent Airbnb user so I know how it works. We booked an apartment in Paris for three days. After payment, we received a notification that the transaction was successful, we were in contact with the host until the settlement, corresponded in the messenger.

When we arrived in Paris, we agreed to meet him at a cafe near the house to give us the keys. However, we were met there by a nice girl who said that Eric (that’s his name) was away on business and asked him to give us the keys. He was friendly enough so it didn’t seem strange to us. But when we got the apartment we needed we were shocked. It was not at all shown in the photos. Moreover, some of the windows had no glass at all. So, just curtains and all.

When I called Eric, he said he forgot to change the photos in the ad. For example, the shootings on the site were made even before I started renting an apartment. “Christine, the remodel has been a bit of a mess this year,” he told me.

Maxim, St. Petersburg

My friends and I went to St. We found an advertisement for daily apartment rentals in St. Petersburg. After exchanging data for communication, the owner of the apartment sent documents, a scan of the passport and reservation and payment terms by e-mail. The text is written very competently and professionally. To confirm the reservation, it was necessary to pay him 3,000 rubles through Yandex Wallet.

He said he didn’t have a card to our offer to transfer money to the card. Initially, it seemed strange to us – in our time, you do not have a card, especially if you are engaged in renting real estate! But we still transferred money to him through Yandex Wallet.

We decided to remind ourselves a week before the trip and wrote him an e-mail. There was no response during the day (although she responded quite quickly, within an hour during our previous communication). We started calling him on his mobile phone, but the subscriber was temporarily blocked. After several unsuccessful attempts to reach him for two days, we finally realized that we had been scammed. When we started to examine the site more carefully, we noticed that this phone number was met several times. And everywhere it was written that he was the owner, and they even found options with the same phone number, but different names in different offers.

Sasha, Bali

My friends and I decided to go to Bali for the winter. We searched for suitable villas in different areas to live in several places at the same time all summer. We liked several options, so without thinking twice, we decided to book right away. All this time, each of us was in contact with the host. We called FaceTime, he showed us the house to make sure everything was ok.

Day X comes, we arrive in Bali and go to settle in the first villa. Everything is fine, the expectations matched the reality. A week later, we write to the owner of the second home to clarify how best to reach him. “You’re already here, what’s the matter?” We get a strange message like It turned out that a group of girls broke into our villa and impersonated us. We couldn’t find a logical explanation for this. The owner turned out to be enough and drove the scammers out of our house.