The Pat Hatter Tries to Use Airbnb

I was looking into renting a house for my family over the summer for a nice long weekend of relaxation. It seems that Airbnb is the way to go these days to do something like this, so I went ahead and tried to book a house.  I got to the step where payment was required, where they posted a link to a cancellation policy. Apparently this house has the "Super Strict 60 Days" policy, which means that there's a 50% refund up to 60 days prior to arrival. My wife's a lawyer and we've had issues with rental agreements for houses in the past, but there was no such rental agreement visible on the website. Actually putting in credit card information and clicking "Book" seemed like committing half the fees without being able to read and sign an agreement. This seemed wrong.

An inquiry into the process yielded this result:

Hi Patrick
You can book this property on this site. The rental agreement will be sent after booking. Please refer to the house rules for additional info. Let us know if you have other questions!

Naturally, this seemed disconcerting because this was the exact order-of-operations that we were trying to avoid. I replied back, trying to elaborate further

Hello,

We reached out yesterday because we would like to book this house, and this
morning we received a text message explaining that we could book on the
website and that the rental agreement would be provided after.  We just
wanted to follow-up because we recently tried to book a house in Wisconsin,
and the owner's rental agreement contained an extremely overbroad
indemnification provision that they were unwilling to modify (my wife's an
attorney).  We just want to make sure that in the event that the rental
agreement contains a provision that we are not comfortable with and so feel
that we cannot sign the rental agreement, that we would get the entire
booking amount back.

If you'd like to discuss over the phone, please let me know.

Thanks!
- Patrick

 After receiving an extremely confusing text message in reply that just said.....

Hi Patrick
We are new to AirBnB, however, we have been in business for many years. I have attached the link to our current r...

I then received the following via e-mail, respondent's name X'd out.

Hi Patrick
We are new to AirBnB, however, we have been in business for many years. I have attached the link to our current rental agreement for you to review. We are in the process of working with AirBnB to update the rental agreement to comply with their regulations as well. (We do not for see any major changes). Please review and let us know if you still have questions. 

XXXX 

(URL HIDDEN)

"URL HIDDEN"? Well that's not super useful, is it......

Hello, 

I received this e-mail, but it appears that the link to the rental agreement was hidden. 

That note also contained a screenshot of what they sent me so that they could understand what was going on. They replied, and it was equally frustrating and comical.

I am assuming certain info is being protected by Airbnb website. I cannot access your email address or see the picture you sent. Give us a call here at (PHONE NUMBER HIDDEN).

Oh for the love of....

Damn it.

Your message appears with "PHONE NUMBER HIDDEN".  I can't see the phone
number.  My e-mail address is xxxxxx@gmail.com  Could you please try to
contact me without going through AirBnB to provide the rental agreement? 

Thanks!
- Patrick

I then recalled what they had said earlier about not being able to see my contact information.  I then checked how my e-mail to them appeared on the messages on the Airbnb website...

Your message appears with "PHONE NUMBER HIDDEN".  I can't see the phone
number.  My e-mail address is (EMAIL HIDDEN)  Could you please try to
contact me without going through AirBnB to provide the rental agreement? 

Thanks!
- Patrick

So this is horrible in both directions. Great.  Let's give this another shot.

Let me try this again. Contact xxxxxx AT gmail DOT com. Maybe that will allow the e-mail to be visible!

After typing that into the message to the host on the Airbnb website, everything looked fine. A minute or two later, I refreshed the page and....

 Let me try this again. Contact (EMAIL HIDDEN) Maybe that will allow the e-mail to be visible!

On second thought, staycations are underrated.