I did not have a typical encounter with Laura, and this is why I'll write it out here because I have always loved Airbnb and I use it all the time when I travel. I ended up cancelling my reservation because I felt that communication between the two of us was not the clearest, and this was because of the following situation--perhaps this was just bad luck, so use discretion when deciding where to stay! Two days before I was to arrive in Madrid, Laura asked me what time I'd be at her place. I told her that since I was coming from California, and wasn't sure how long my delays/layovers as well as transportation time would me, I could only give my best guess. She was very frank and told me she needed an exact time, but she was also accommodating and offered to give me a place to store my luggage in the few hours before check-in (4 pm) after I'd arrived. Very nice! However: when I got to Madrid 24 hours later, Laura was pretty rude and inflexible when my projected arrival time was off by an hour. As a result, when I got to her place to drop my bags (as she'd instructed me to do), Laura rescinded her offer to let me leave the bags because I was late and she had other things to do at a certain time. Had I known she had to be somewhere, I would've been happy to wait in the airport until 4 pm and normal check-in time. But here I was, a young, solo-traveling female, stranded in the middle of Madrid with three bags and hardly any data to figure out what to do. I sat down on a bench to figure out what to do and a hoard of Spanish teenagers at a local tapas bar started pelting me with chewed-up olive pits. Really not a fun time, so I ended up staying somewhere else where I could expect more pleasantries after a long and exhausting trip.