Airbnb Drop

Getaway From Our Original Getaway

Airbnb is a fine resource for travelers and an unregulated crap shoot. You take a chance, renting a place, trusting Superhost status and guests’ 5 star ratings, when really, you shouldn’t.

I am writing from a wonderful Airbnb in upstate New York that my daughter Hannah found in our frantic effort to escape from the hellhole Airbnb I’d booked in Massachusetts. The place we are in now, described as overlooking a pond, overlooks a pond. The other place, described as having a mountain view, had a view of a mountain, if you consider the swampy, tangled underbelly of a hill a mountain. The actual view was of the working factory next door belching smoke and the busy state highway mere feet from the front door.

The place we are in now, with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, is only $10.00 a day more expensive than the little farmhouse of horrors. In sharp contrast to the Berkshires place, our refrigerator is not broken. Here, there are doors on each bedroom, as opposed to fringe in lieu of a door at the Berkshires place. Here, there is a TV. There, there was no TV, but with no couch to sit on, the TV was probably pointless.

Hannah set to work, and found a place that was immediately available to us and our dog Charlie. And, as grim as the Berkshires place was, its nightmarish unsuitability has made our present spacious haven in idyllic surroundings shine like the sun.

So maybe this post is not so much a gripe about Airbnb’s lack of regulation or accuracy or oversight, but an adventure story about a close call, a triumph over adversity written from the fullest appreciation of landing at a happy ending.