Help! I Was Catfished by My Airbnb Host and the Place Was a Mess

Dear Tripped Up,

In July, my daughter, my partner and I spent a week in London in an $800-a-night rental flat we found on Airbnb. It was my first time using the company, and, as suggested, I sent a note to our host “Emily,” telling her about our trip. By the time we left for London, there was a second host listed, but the profile picture was still (we thought) of Emily. “Emily and Tony” instructed us to pick up the keys at a convenience store that worked with KeyNest, a company that facilitates secure transfer of keys. But the keys weren’t there, so we called our host’s contact number and were connected with a representative of Houst, which turned out to be a company that manages the apartment for the owner, which turned out to be another company called Silverbird Properties. When we asked the Houst representative if he could run over an extra set of keys, he told us he could not — he was in Portugal.

After almost three hours waiting on a somewhat dodgy street with our suitcases, our keys finally arrived. But the apartment was not as advertised: Among other things, the elevator was broken and had been for months, the bathroom was moldy and the shower was stopped up with a thicket of human hair I removed (ick) from the drain. After our stay I wrote to Airbnb requesting one day’s rental back — about $900 total with fees. Airbnb told me Houst had at first agreed to the refund but then reneged, claiming I had never returned the keys. (I did return them, to the same convenience store.) I believe I deserve that day’s rent refunded, but I also want Airbnb to make the listing clear for others that the property is managed by a third-party company operating on the cheap posing as someone named Emily. Can you help? Jim, Bethesda, Md.

Dear Jim,

Hearing from a first-time Airbnb user is a breath of fresh air: I’ve used Airbnb regularly enough to have normalized how absurd it is that the face smiling out at you from countless host profiles is often not the owner but a commercial representative or property manager aiming to look as though they are welcoming you to their cozy home.

The svelte, swimsuit-clad blonde in the photo is not Emily, a bit of digging reveals, but a former girlfriend of the Hamburg-based photographer Patrick Pilz. He told me via email that he captured her posing in a swimming pool in Bali, posted it on his Instagram in 2014 and made it available as a free stock photo on the site StockSnap. It has since been used across the