Here’s a little known fact that we’d all do well to apply to life, the universe, and everything: rules don’t actually exist. In the overwhelming majority of situations, people will simply engage with any given context as they see fit, and the context will respond as it sees fit, regardless of how it’s “supposed” to respond.
In saying that, Airbnb’s refund policy is more or less a dartboard with the word “refund” and “no refund” scattered across it, and whenever a guest tries to get a refund, that dartboard is given a hefty spin, assuming the company decides to throw anything at it at all. A recent guest of TikTok‘s @mrsmessytiktok lucked out when their case stepped up to the plate, but Mrs. Messy seems convinced that this was a calculation for the ages.
As Mrs. Messy (a name which, if also used in her Airbnb profile, might have had a hand in getting this refund approved, let’s be honest) vacuums a carpet in a far more satisfying manner than is necessary, text on the screen recounts the incantation that her last guest spun in order to get a refund on their stay.
Over the course of the six-day stay that saw no communication between the guest and Mrs. Messy, the guest concocted complaints about residual hair in the bathroom and a double threat of a powerful stench and cockroach invasion throughout the home. She even claimed that someone came to knock on her window most every night that she was there, which presumably played the biggest role in compromising her hypothetical sense of safety.
After this message was sent, Airbnb apparently refunded the guest without consulting Mrs. Messy about anything. If they had, she would have been happy to tell the company that her Airbnb was void of hairy bathrooms, cockroaches, and late-night knockers. All of those, of course, would have been in violation of Airbnb’s list of Reservation Issues by way of being uninhabitably unsanitary.
When these occur, a guest is given a full or partial refund, or is relocated to a different, nearby Airbnb with a similar price in the event that one is available. Given that the guest waited until the last minute to report her displeasure and cited her own sense of non-safety as the reason for delaying it, that was probably key to manifesting the full refund.
And yet, all of this is just anecdotal evidence; the same type of evidence that could just as easily suggest that Airbnb wouldn’t offer a refund even if a property advertised as a luxury condo turned out to be a giant hole in the ground. By Mrs. Messy’s account, she’s had two guests manipulate their way out of paying. In reality, many more have probably tried and failed to do such a thing, but had no luck simply because Airbnb probably didn’t feel like refunding them that day.
So feel free to try this refund hack as you would any shot in the dark, but don’t expect it to work, and certainly don’t expect walk away with an unaffected guest rating.