Hands down the worst experience I’ve ever had on Airbnb/ Kasa, from the moment I booked the reservation to the fire alarm going off for over 2 hours at 4 am. My favorite part about this experience was the refund I got after hours of trying to communicate with the host platform, Kasa.
There’s currently a glitch in their reservation handling where I had to call both Airbnb and Kasa myself to be able to check in and pay my pet fee on Airbnb’s platform. They also tried to make me verify my identity on their third party site and send photos of my ID, my boyfriend’s ID, my license plate number, and credit card info, when I’d already done that through Airbnb. After over an hour of calling Airbnb and Kasa, they finally acknowledged the error and let me have the code to my room.
Once I actually got to my room, I wasn’t able to actually enjoy it. The building wide fire alarm started going off at 4:45 am, and wasn’t turned off for over 2 hours. I also kept getting messages from Kasa saying I’d been too loud, courtesy of the decibel level meter they keep in every room. Maybe it had something to do with the building fire alarm blaring for hours on end? I know for a fact it wasn’t us- we weren’t even allowed in our room.
I sat in the parking lot and watched as San Jose FD came to the scene, couldn’t get into the control panels (a guest had to let him in using their code), and then gave up. THERE WAS NO FIRE. I called Kasa while sitting in the parking lot and the customer service rep tried telling me the fire alarm had been turned off, WHILE IT WAS STILL BLARING IN THE BACKGROUND. Once they heard it, they apologized. I’m not sure why they were relying on guests for updates like that, but that was the icing on the cake for us.
After hours of calling around, we were told that it was a “vendor glitch and tech issue” that traumatized my dog and ruined our stay. My boyfriend had to go into the building while the false alarm was blaring, load all of our things into our car, and we left after we couldn’t take the noise and chaos anymore.
They did give us a $25 gift card for breakfast, but since I couldn’t use the room for the majority of the time I’d actually booked it for, I spent a solid hour having to call and ask for a refund.
I wouldn’t recommend this stay to literally anybody. Sleep in your car instead if you have to. (I did.)