Airbnb hosts return to find homes trashed on NYE
A US couple and a woman in the UK have returned to their homes to find them trashed by Airbnb guests after NYE parties.
In California, a renter, who the couple thought was an older man, was in fact a teenager who had rented the property to celebrate New Year’s Eve – and throw himself an 18th birthday bash.
Jim Santi-Owen and Reshma Vansanwala were devastated when they returned to their Oakland home to find it littered with beers cans and broken bottles.
Ciagrette butts had been strewn throughout the house and furniture was moved into different rooms.
"Our beautiful new furniture was out on the deck," Santi-Owen told KPIX-TV.
The couple even found blood splattered on a wall.
They were alerted to the bash by a neighbour, who text Mr Santi-Owen saying “there’s 40 or 50 youth here, thowing a party, they’ve been shouting for over an hour,” he said.
The teenager has since been arrested and charged with vandalism.
Neighbours told ABC7 News that 200 young people were in the street until police came.
In a statement to the station, an Airbnb spokesperson said the young man had been banned from Airbnb and the company’s ‘Trust and Safety team’ had contacted the hosts “to work with them under our $1 Million Host Guarantee, which covers a host's property in the rare event of damages".
The company projected that over one million people used its booking service for New Year’s Eve - Mr Santi-Owen and Ms Vansanwala were not the only hosts to return to a nasty surprise.
In the UK, the Mirror reported a woman was punched in the stomach when she tried to break-up a ‘drug-fuelled’ party organised by an Airbnb guest at her $1million apartment.
Christina McQuillan was alerted by neighbours who rang her complaining about loud music and the smell of pot coming from her south west London flat.
She arrived to find flooring ripped up, a TV torn of the wall and a couple having sex in a bedroom with "a crowd of people" watching.
"It was shocking. It was really scary, we had no idea what we would see,” Ms McQuillan told the Mirror.
“When we got there the doors were wide open. There was loud music and everyone was smoking drugs.”
When she and her boyfriend eventually got people to start leaving, she was assaulted at the door by a man in a hoody.
Airbnb also said in this case that they had offered to pay for the damage.
