December 22, 2016
Leslie Root usually stays with friends when she visits Washington, DC, but for her most recent trip, she wanted something more adult. So two weeks before she was scheduled to attend a conference, the UC Berkeley grad student rented an Airbnb in a high-rise building on Connecticut Avenue. But as soon as the place was booked, Root got a message from her host that’s probably familiar to regular users of Airbnb: The host said that she wouldn’t be there for the duration of the trip, and that Root should ask for the key at the front desk when she arrived. “I’ll leave an envelope,” Root remembered her host saying in the message, “but don’t mention Airbnb.” Right away, Root started to worry — why would a security guard give her keys to an apartment when the owner wasn’t home? And how could she pass herself off as an old friend of her host’s when the two had never met? Said Root, “It was like, ‘Ugh, god, am I really paying to do this?’”…
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/say-youre-just-a-friend?utm_term=.srKzMO585b#.roog29151p
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