Hi,

Recently some friends and I went on holiday to a villa rented through AirBnB. While there we cracked a plant pot, and some soil leaked into the pool. We spent the penultimate day cleaning and scrubbing the place because we felt guilty and left the place in pristine condition.

We left at 8am, the host had guests in at 12 noon the same day.

Upon being home a few days, the host put through some damages for us to pay amounting to a staggering 684€. This included;

- Cracked Plant pot (80€)

- Damaged IKEA towel and damaged IKEA bedding (50€)

- Pool Cleaning (50€)

- Cracked pool tile (500€).

We were shocked.

- Despite scrubbing the place clean and actually checking for damages, we did not see any cracked tiles and do not believe it was us at all.

- The plant pot was heavy, so we are assuming shes damaged the tile herself replacing the plant pot. Regardless, we think this should be covered by insurance.

- We payed a £237.49 cleaning fee up front; we think the pool should be covered by this

- The IKEA towel and bedding was damaged by bleach that the host left on the floor. This also ruined all the girls bikinis, by bleaching them!

We refused to pay the sum the host demanded. She then responded with "We just had an email from the tile constructor who thinks that the tile would cost 250€ instead of 500€".

At this point, her costs include 0 receipts or proof of cost of any kind, and we found the IKEA towels online for £4.84 (IKEA website).

Anyway, we declined the payment and she went to the resolution centre. The resolution centre is supposed to ask for both sides of the story and come to a fair settlement. The "expert" got in contact to say she was getting information from Hilde and would then contact us.

We then went to support and asked about the Security Deposit. There was no security deposit set on the property, and from research, to us this means anything we pay is on our sole good nature.

The expert never contacted us; the next message from her was a breakdown of the costs she told us we must pay and our AirBNB account is deactivated until we pay. There was still no proof at all of any costs either, no receipts, nothing.

We will not pay for absurd damages that we did not cause, knowing she has tried to ripp us off and certainly not when the "expert" never got in contact with us!

- Can AirBNB force us to pay without a security deposit?

- What can we do here?

Please help,

Ryan

Without any quotes or evidence of costs they can't get anything.

I suppose if they really want to be compensated they'll eventually have to get quotes and send them to you.

A cracked tile at £250 is truly absurd, unless it was an ancient Greek one.

Max £50 fitted by any tiler in the country.

I don't know if airbnb gets involved with disputes of these kind , you need to look at their t&c, however my feeling is that they could foot the bill knowing that they can lose customers over this and get bad reviews.

Reply to them asking for quotes and highlighting that the only thing you admit is cracking the pot, no other damage.