Vanessa S.: How to get kicked out of your Airbnb in 48 hours – Part 2

On Sunday, everything went surprisingly quietly at first. Almost too quietly. So, we contacted Airbnb support again because all issues are supposed to be reported within the first 72 hours. However, that didn't really get us anywhere. We decided we'd rather spend the day at the beach and waited for Stefan to arrive in the evening. Together, we grabbed smash burgers and told him what happened the last two days. He laughed, we laughed, and for a brief moment, we actually thought peace might finally return. Exactly at that moment, at 12:30 AM, I got a message on my phone.

The message from Miri was short and anything but friendly: "You are scammers! Move out of my apartment!" At first, we thought it was a bad joke. But it quickly became clear that she was serious. She immediately saw the sum we requested as a scam, and instead of writing to us normally and negotiating a reasonable solution, she bombarded us with messages until 1 AM. Airbnb support became our middleman in the whole situation and gave us until Tuesday at 11 AM to pack all our things. We were quite shocked that everything escalated so fast but also wanted to leave on principle.

So, in the middle of the night, our massive apartment search began. We had one and a half days to find an accommodation. The only problem was that none of us had enough money to spontaneously pay for a new place because the Airbnb refund wouldn't come through until a few days later. The story from Stefan's perspective must be the wildest, though: he had barely arrived, and he already had to leave again. We desperately searched for new accommodation until about five in the morning before deciding to get at least three hours of sleep. We realised that it was definitely NOT easy to find something new and Airbnb didn’t help us either.

With bags under our eyes down to the floor, headaches, and about as much energy as a phone on 1% battery, we went to our Erasmus+ agency on Monday. Claudio greeted us warmly and noticed immediately that something was wrong. After we told Claudio everything, he immediately helped us with the apartment search and sent us various offers. While Amelie and I were actually supposed to be working, we spent the next few hours looking for apartments and sending out inquiries (we even had our eye on a camper van, that's how desperate we were). Luckily our workplace didn’t mind, because they understood our problem and didn’t have a lot of tasks for us on the first day anyway. Shortly after 2 PM, a message suddenly arrived from Miri. She apologised for everything, said we could stay in the apartment after all, and announced she was sending a cleaning lady. We felt incredibly messed around, but we were also relieved and promised ourselves not to complain any more. If we didn’t have this financial issue, we would have left anyway, but in our case it was better to stay. She also offered a little refund. What might be important to mention is that the accommodation was very expensive and had been portrayed as luxurious in the listing, which is why we complained so much about the mould. The situation escalated so much, only for her to apologise half a day later.

The next day, the cleaning lady actually showed up. However, her statement was almost as legendary as our experiences so far: "I'm only cleaning the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the bathroom. The rest is not my job." So, in the end, we did exactly what we had planned from the very beginning - we just cleaned the apartment ourselves. Looking back, we can laugh about everything. Within just 48 hours, we looked for the wrong apartment, locked ourselves out, negotiated with a locksmith, discovered mould in almost every household appliance, contacted Airbnb, received an eviction notice in the middle of the night, searched for a new place until five in the morning, and almost ended up homeless (well, the agency would have kindly helped us out, so not 100% true). And all of this before our Erasmusdays experience had even properly begun.

If that was just the first 48 hours, we can't wait to see what Barcelona has in store for us next...