Host cancelled my booking just before I arrived.
I checked everything was fine with the host 2 days before the trip but had an email less than 12 hours before I was due to arrive saying they’d had a personal emergency and could no longer host me.
I only had an hour before I had to leave to get my flight. Airbnb tried to find me an alternative but unfortunately due to conferences happening in Berlin that weekend there was an unusal shortage of vacancies, no suitable airbnb properties and all the hotels were either fully booked, or charging up to 3 x their usual rates. I ended up having to switch between 2* hotels at a huge expense.
Airbnb fully refunded my original booking and provided me with some compensation towards the cost of the hotels but I’m still down about €200 and had a rubbish start to my trip. Berlin is a great city and I do like using Airbnb but I wouldn’t use the combination of the two again. My advice would be to just book a hotel well in advance, as the rules in Berlin make it more risky to use Airbnb than other cities.
I’ll update this if I get the remainder of compensation from Airbnb but as things stand I’ve been left out of pocket and would recommend others avoid booking anything in Berlin that doesn’t cover you if things go wrong.