Jiayu Chen
Google
Booked one night on Airbnb for $53 and wanted to stay one more night, Airbnb showed it’d only be $25 extra to extend, but the host said I couldn’t modify on the check out day and told me to rebook. Rebooking was another full $53 so I checked other platforms and found Booking.com has the same room for $33, so obviously I booked it there.
It took a while, but they eventually let me stay in the same room. All good, until checkout.
I left before 10am, dropped the key exactly as instructed. A bit later I got a message saying I hadn’t checked out, and it was entirely in Chinese.
Just to clarify: I am Chinese and I can read it. But I’d been speaking in English the whole time, and I’m traveling on a U.S. passport. So to get a warning message out of nowhere in Chinese felt like they completely ignored how I’d been communicating, and just assumed based on my background that I hadn’t followed the rules.
It’s not about the language, it’s the fact that they chose to switch just to accuse me of something, without even trying English first. That kind of snap judgment didn’t sit right with me. It came off as stereotyping, and I found it disrespectful.