No big deal, I thought. I switched to another card. Same red banner. I tried my balance of gift credits. No luck. Over the next hour I repeated the ritual from three different devices—laptop, phone, even an old tablet—using cards issued while living and working all around Europe, both Americas, the Middle East. Every attempt ended the same way: an error, no explanation.
For the first time in ten years of globe-trotting stays—rooftops in Lisbon, cabins in Patagonia, canal apartments in Amsterdam, lofts in San Francisco, studios in Dubai—Airbnb slammed a door in my face.
So began my long walk through support.
The chat agent was polite and assured me a “specialist” would email me. Days passed, and no email came. I tried again and again. Each new thread ended with the identical promise and then quietly closed itself, as if the system were sweeping the conversation under a rug before anyone read it.
Weeks rolled by. Prices near the event city crept upward. My friends kept asking for confirmation; I kept refreshing my inbox. Silence. Finally another canned reply appeared in chat: something about needing “extra information” on their side, yet nobody told me what information that might be, or how to provide it. Just another promise to write later.
It’s now almost two months since the first error. I still can’t pay for a single night, even in a hut on the other side of the planet. I’ve poured countless evenings into repeating the same steps, telling the same story, and hearing the same scripted sympathy.
I’m sharing this here because public sunlight solved a similar nightmare I once had with another Big Tech company. Maybe lightning strikes twice. Has anyone else fallen into this silent payment limbo—and escaped? I’d love to hear how.