Woman Checks Into California Airbnb. Then Her Skin Gets Itchy And Her Eyes Get Watery: ‘Customer Service Was Awful’

A family that booked a lakeside house in Southern California for the whole of July lasted a single night after experiencing alarming medical symptoms. They say two of them broke out in welts and woke at 3am with headaches. An urgent care doctor wrote a note saying they could not go back inside their Airbnb.

Then they said they were still on the hook for half the cost of the month-long stay.

Maya Bahu (@mayabahu), a California creator whose channel runs to travel, fashion and the occasional story from her life, laid out the sequence in a five-minute, 24-second video that has so far drawn more than 144,000 views.

“I’m making this video to share my Airbnb experience literally from hell,” she says. Her caption is blunter: “@airbnb worst customer service ever.”

Bahu didn’t respond to an email.

What Happened At The Airbnb?

Upon arrival, the house itself looked fine, she says, and the family settled in to unload. Then she and her younger sister started itching. “My eyes start to get kind of watery,” she says. “I’m not thinking it’s a house, obviously, because why would it be the house?”

Then, on a grocery run, “I noticed that I stopped itching,” she says. “All those symptoms I was feeling subside as soon as I left the property.” Back at the house, the family tried covering the furniture with sheets and moving between rooms, without improvement. By the next morning it had escalated. Both sisters woke in the night with headaches that “almost made us feel like we got hit with a baseball bat,” she says, and the rash had spread. “We had welts on our arms, on our knees,” she says, along with constant sneezing and coughing.

They never established the cause, and she is careful to spell out some context. “We are allergic to something in the home, whether it be dust, animal hair, it could have not been cleaned well, mold, something,” she says. Replying to a commenter later, she narrowed her own guess: “Our only guess is mold. The house hadn’t been rented out in a few years.”

Bahu’s symptoms track with what the Environmental Protection Agency describes as common reactions to mold. Molds “produce allergens” and irritants, the agency says, and touching or inhaling spores “may cause allergic reactions in sensitive individuals,” with responses that “include hay fever-type symptoms, such as sneezing, runny nose, red eyes, and skin rash.” Nobody tested the property, so what triggered the reaction remains unknown.

Did They Get A Refund?

When her mother messaged the host, she says they asked for evidence. So the family drove to Irvine, waited three hours at urgent care and paid to be seen. They came away with a diagnosis and written instructions. “We get a whole doctor’s note saying that we cannot go back to the house, and that if we have to go back, we need to stay outside,” she says. “So please let me know how we’re supposed to go and sleep in there for a month.”

They purportedly sent the host the letter along with photographs of the hives. Bahu says he declined a full refund anyway, she says, on the grounds “that he cannot give us a refund because he’s going to get penalized,” and pointed them to Airbnb instead. Airbnb, she says, told her the decision belonged to the host, who had agreed to return half.

“We can only get 50% of our money back even though we only stayed there for one night,” she says.

What Does Airbnb’s Policy Say?

Airbnb’s rebooking and refund policy for homes defines a covered “reservation issue” to include accommodations that “are not habitable at check-in,” listing among the reasons that a place is “not reasonably clean and sanitary” or that it “contain[s] safety or health hazards.”

The process page specifies what happens when a host refuses a refund. Guests have 72 hours from discovering a problem to open a request, and Airbnb tells them that “if your host doesn’t reply or says no, you can ask Airbnb for help.” Should the host not resolve it, the instruction is to “ask Airbnb to step in,” at which point “we’ll review our rebooking and refund policy for homes to help resolve the issue.”

Hosts in the comments questioned the penalty explanation too. “As an Airbnb host myself, the host should’ve refunded every unused night,” wrote one, explaining that a host who cancels does get penalised, but that a guest-side cancellation avoids it. “I’m not sure why refunding you will penalize him if you cancel on your end. That’s just baloney.”

Others put the case for the host. A commenter posting as Airbnb Lady Christina argued the platform now expects travellers to buy trip insurance for exactly this, and asked whether an allergy is really the host’s fault when “not everybody was allergic to it, so it’s very person specific.” Several viewers, among them Nattyd27, raised the same question about why only two of the party had a reaction.

Lots of viewers told her to stop negotiating and go to the card issuer. Doa.Albattat described doing precisely that after a Moroccan booking went wrong: “I fought it for 7 weeks with my credit card company. Finally got my refund.” That route has a legal backstop, because the Fair Credit Billing Act lets consumers dispute charges for things “you didn’t accept or weren’t delivered as agreed,” in writing, within 60 days of the first statement carrying the charge.

Bahu has not named the property. “Don’t want to blast the home yet,” she told one commenter. “Let’s see what they can do.”

In the end, it may have worked out for her family.

Via email, an Airbnb spokesperson told BoardingArea, “We set quality standards for hosts and homes, so guests can feel confident knowing what to expect from a stay. We were disappointed to learn about this experience, and have reached out to the guest to provide a full refund and reimbursement for additional costs.”

@mayabahu @airbnb worst customer service ever. #fyp #airbnb #foryoupageofficiall #storytime ♬ original sound – Maya Bahu