TLDR: The host cancelled our reservation that we booked weeks ago a few hours before we were due to check in.
Full Read: So you've seen the photos of this beautiful property and are currently scrolling through the reviews deciding if you want to reserve it or not. Let me tell you about my experience with this company. Myself and fourteen other friends booked this place for an amazing getaway weekend to LA for a few weeks in the future. We saw all the other reviews about the place and saw that pretty much half of them were good or amazing and the other half had one thing in common happen: the host cancelled their reservation a few hours before they were due to check in. Funnily enough my reservation fell into one of these two categories too. And it wasn't the first category.
When I booked the property the host messaged me asking how many people will be coming and if I was planning a party. I responded with the number of people that would be coming and that we would be having a party/some drinks to celebrate and then heading into the nightclub one of the nights. The host did not respond after that message so I naively assumed there would be no further problems and told everyone everything was all good. People booked flights, made roadtrip plans etc. for that weekend and everyone was super excited.
So the day finally comes, everyone is either en route or in the air. I'm about 1-2 hours away and I receive a message from the host saying that they don't allow parties and I quote "will allow you to cancel free of charge despite our strict cancellation policy". Again at this point I'm still naive and didn't realise they were instructing me to cancel. I message them back stating that's no problem, we won't drink anything and will go to central LA for drinks. I get a similar message back from the host pretty much straight away stating I have broken the house rules and that they will allow me to cancel. Bear in mind that these are the first messages I have received from them MULTIPLE WEEKS after making the original booking. I then ask for a phone number so that I can speak to them on the phone. This ultimately was a waste of time as the man at the other end went round in circles, stating that the message I sent weeks ago breached house rules and that it was "just policy". I asked for some compensation or another house to stay at but I was told this was not possible. He was also very insistent on me cancelling the reservation on AirBnB instead of him, most likely to make me look like the bad guy.
To summarise, we have people currently flying and driving in with no place to say. These are people who put trust in me to provide some level of accommodation to have a decent weekend. If I had no place for them to stay they would have a bad weekend and I would indirectly be the one held responsible. Luckily, AirBnb are actual saints and we able to sort us out with something for the weekend. My closing message to you all: read the reviews. If you are like myself and are super optimistic, thinking there's no way it will get cancelled I ask you this: why risk it?