We had booked the AirBnB back in December 2021 for a visit in mid April 2022. Leon reached out and asked some basic information of when we plan to arrive and how many guests. I responded back with the information and did not receive anything back at the time, which was perfectly fine.
On the Tuesday before we were set to arrive (so 3 days prior to our arrival) I reached out with check in information as that had not been sent over with the Booking confirmation. Leon said we would get it that morning of our arrival. Totally fine as that could be for privacy reasons and we went about our day.
That Friday arrives and we still did not get the check in information. We land in Chicago around 8am and start exploring the city, killing time until check in which was 4pm. We wanted to get to the AirBnB to drop off our bags and kick our feet up after the early flight and explore the neighborhood the AirBnB was in.
4pm comes around (which was the check in time) and still no information. I sent a message to Leon around 4:15pm and we decided to have an early dinner to wait to get a response. I then tried calling a hour later and there was no response and I was not able to leave a voicemail as his voicemail inbox was not set up.
This then lead to another phone call with AirBnB support where they also sent Leon a message and tried calling him again with no response. They sent a message saying he had 30 minutes to respond otherwise the booking is cancelled. Maybe 10 minutes after that message is sent we finally get the check in information, which was close to 2 hours after check in time.
I totally understand if there was an emergency that had to be taken care of or even if Leon forgot to send the message. However in the check in message that was sent there was no apology, no information as to why it get sent late, and it just came across as nothing happened.
Because of the frustration and stress, we decided to cancel the booking. Fortunately AirBnB refunded us the money we spent to book the room. But this miscommunication from Leon completely flipped our plans for the trip. We chose his AirBnB because it was close to a concert venue. It was also close to the Chinatown area that we wanted to explore.
We had this AirBnB booked for nearly 4 months and tried planning things around it. But since our location got drastically changed it made us have to re-plan our trip.
I just hope that this was a one time thing and that future guests who stay in any of Leon's AirBnB don't have to go through a situation like this.