Airbnb renter allergic to cats found his £1,000 rental was full of cat hair

NEWS AND COMMENT: this is a nice little story about Airbnb and the shedding of hair by domestic cats which is something that a person allergic to cats cannot tolerate!

This person, Graeme Dodd, from Perth & Kinross in Scotland was renting an Abu Dhabi apartment under an Airbnb scheme. He agreed a rental of £1,000 for 10 nights. He arrived at the apartment in Abu Dhabi with his wife and two children.

Graeme Dodd is allergic to cats! He found that the Airbnb rental flat was covered in hair and could not accept it. Comment: there appears to be no attempt to hoover the flat or get rid of the hair.

It appears that Graeme Dodd wanted to cancel the Airbnb offered and the host offered to help by finding alternative accommodation and they agreed to refund the original booking.

However, the alternative apartment was much more expensive costing £3,700 even though it was in a similar location and of a similar size. Graeme Dodd and his family were offered other alternatives but they were either too far away or of a lower standard.

Airbnb then decided to charge Mr Dodd "for both bookings". It's not clear what that means but it is clear that Mr Dodd's 10 day stay worked out at £4,700 which was totally unacceptable to him.

Mr Dodd struggled to resolve the dispute and he wrote to Katherine Denham of The Times newspaper who unsurprisingly managed to obtain a full reimbursement of £2,700 together with a £1,000 refund for the original booking meaning that his ten-day initial charge of £4,700 was reduced to £1000 which was the original price of the rental agreement. 💕😍

Lesson learned? Nothing really except for the landlord who clearly did not offer up his flat to an Airbnb client in an appropriate condition. It appears that he got sloppy. The cat hair belonged to his/her cat! 😸

But if the landlord i.e. the flat's owner lived within a 30 minute drive from the apartment it would have been better, perhaps, if (s)he had simply turned up and hoovered the place top to bottom to remove the cat hair.

Source: The Times hard copy newspaper. Thanks and well done Katherine Denham.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.