As my friends and I plan our senior trip more, hiccups have popped up. Although the horrors of finding hotels, managing budgets, and buying airline tickets were unavoidable, one unexpected obstacle came up during this planning process: Airbnbs. With my friend group traveling to two separate countries, we decided to book both Airbnbs in one country and hotels in another. Now my preconception of Airbnbs was nice and grand, seeing that many people around the world are renting out their houses and apartments for tourists.
However, as I looked around Tokyo, Japan’s capital city on the Airbnb map, I saw that there wasn’t a wide selection of easy and good-to-go places. Luckily we quickly found two cheap apartments in convenient locations to hold all six people in our group. Unfortunately, someone quickly stole our time for our apartment in Tokyo. In fear of possibly getting another place stolen from us, we decided to quickly find a place to stay near Tokyo and reserve it as soon as possible.
Rushing this Airbnb turned out to be a terrible decision since we found a new Airbnb location that was cheaper and better than the one we had just reserved. “No worries,” I thought to myself. Since we had just booked the Airbnb a few weeks ago and it was months before the actual date we would check in, I expected a full refund.
However, Airbnb’s cancellation policy is quite strict with them only giving full refunds within the first 48 hours of booking, and only 50% any days after that. With not many options left, we decided to directly contact the Airbnb host to see if we could get a full refund as we were booking months in advance.
Sadly, the hosts were firm on the 50% refund so my friends and I are going to have to deal with the middle-of-the-pack Airbnb. Learn from my mistakes and make sure to watch out if you’re planning to book any Airbnbs for your future trips as the cancellation policy is quite strict.