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Ankkit Aggarwal loves Airbnb. He's a web developer who owns several luxury condos in Toronto and rents them out via Airbnb, Roomorama, HouseTrip and through his own website, Hydewest.
(See photos of Aggarwal's trashed condo and broken furniture.)
Since 2012, Airbnb has sent him more than $160,000 worth of bookings, according to his Airbnb account.
But Aggarwal was booted from Airbnb when he submitted claims after one of his guests severely damaged an Italian bed in a luxury condo worth $2.5 million that will cost over $6,000 to replace, he said.
In response, the room-renting company decided he had broken their rules, cut him off, blocked his account and cancelled over $25,000 worth of upcoming bookings, he says, and then told those guests that it was him, not Airbnb, who cancelled the rooms.
Airbnb promises hosts that it will cover them for up to $1 million worth of damage, as part of the Airbnb's Host Guarantee. While it won't cover everything (like missing cash or rare art), generally, Airbnb has a great reputation when it comes to protecting hosts against nightmare guests.
Airbnb tells Business Insider it cancelled his host's account because they'd received too many complaints about him. They say he was collecting money outside the Airbnb system and before booting him, tried to work with him.
Airbnb spokesperson Kim Rubey explained:
In 2012 there were 3 million total guests who stayed on Airbnb, yet there were only 400 situations resolved under the Host Guarantee program. Only a tiny percentage of guests on Airbnb result in a Host Guarantee situation, and we take each one very seriously, including this host’s claim of damaged furniture. Unfortunately, this host consistently provided very poor experiences to guests -- he violated Airbnb’s Terms of Service multiple times and we’ve received numerous complaints from guests about bad experiences.
Aggarwal denies much of this. It's a he-said, she-said story, for sure. But the tale is also about what can go wrong when Airbnb believes a host is breaking its rules.
Here is how it happened.
This is what Aggarwal's Toronto apartment looked like before all the drama started.
Aggarwal says he had the typical problems of any rental business. This set of guests, however, trashed the apartment. Guests are required to leave Airbnb apartments in a clean condition.
"Out of 86 guests, I've only had problems with 15 guests," Aggarwal told Business Insider. "You see, I love Airbnb, that's why I take all these bullets as a business expense."
This was a three-day stay. There was garbage everywhere. Airbnb says it paid Aggarwal a $1,310 Host Guarantee payment to cover the damage and the cleaning bill.
The cleaning bill alone was $830, Aggarwal says. Airbnb says that if a host collects money outside of the Airbnb system, that's a violation of the terms of service that voids the host guarantee. (Airbnb only makes money when it collects a 3% fee from each transaction.)
The guests broke stuff too, like this lamp. Aggarwal says he never deliberately violated Airbnb's terms of service. "I'm willing to get any kind of thing in writing Airbnb wants promising them that I won't break rules," he told us.
They moved a lot of furniture, even manhandling the lamps.
A glass chess set used to live on that black end table. It went missing.
Many towels were damaged.
Glasses were broken, wine spills were wiped up with the towels.
All told, damage tallied $1,050, according to the bill shown to Business Insider. It took a three-person professional cleaning crew five hours to clean this mess.
Strangely, these same guests flipped the mattress on the bed upside down ...
And when they did, they damaged the roller shade beyond repair.
All this damage done from one set of guests in three days.
Another guest broke the couch, Aggarwal says. The couch on the right should be upright like the one on the left but the frame was broken. (Airbnb disputes responsibility for this couch.)
Another guest broke a $6,000 Italian bed. They cracked the bed frame.
Here's a close up view of the missing screws. Under that you can see the crack in the frame. Aggarwal says of Airbnb, "What they have done to me isn't right, cutting me off. Not talking. No way to reach them."
Airbnb says, "We attempted to work with him to improve his guest experience, and we've spoken with him via phone or email on 13 different occasions. The poor guest experiences continued, however, so we removed the host from the Airbnb community."
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Julie Bort was Business Insider's Editor at Large for the Tech team. She loves investigating stories and shedding light on the tech industry's most amazing people.Here's a small sample of some of Julie's work.Former Pinterest employees describe a traumatic workplace where managers humiliate employees until they cry, Black people feel alienated, and the toxic culture 'eats away at your soul'Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann's WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked itInsiders say WeWork's IT is a patchwork of cheap devices and Band-Aid fixes that will take millions to fixWeWork's toxic phone booths were created in-house by its Powered by We business70-hour weeks and 'WTF' emails: 42 employees reveal the frenzy of working at Tesla under the 'cult' of Elon MuskElon Musk works so many hours at Tesla, employees are constantly finding him asleep under tables and desksHow this woman went from a Pizza Hut employee to a founder of a $4 billion startupAn Oracle insider explains how some salespeople gamed the system to sell more cloudTHE TAKEDOWN OF TRAVIS KALANICK: The untold story of Uber's infighting, backstabbing, and multimillion-dollar exit packagesMicrosoft is in talks to buy GitHub, a startup at the center of the software world last valued at $2 billionThe alarming inside story of a failed Google acquisition, and an employee who was hospitalizedInside Facebook's plan to eat another $350 billion IT marketHow a registered sex offender wound up living in an Airbnb hosting unsuspecting guestsA controversial ex-banker is the person who really runs Twitter — and he's gambling the company's future on one risky betSecret passages and skipped meals: Oracle's CEO gave us a rare peek at what it really takes to run a $37 billion companyHP told some employees to choose between becoming contractors with no benefits or being fired without severance'I felt like we were being extorted': Customer says Oracle tried to strong-arm him into a cloud saleHow the queen of Silicon Valley is helping Google go after Amazon's most profitable businessAirbnb host: A guest is squatting in my condo and I can't get him to leaveLIES, BOOZE, AND BILLIONS: How one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley history raised $580 million then spiraled out of controlGitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside storyWhen she's not writing for Business Insider, Julie can usually be found on the trails, on my mountain bike, or on my skis, if you know where to look.
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