Thelife- For nearly a year, Jeff Palkevich had been regularly visited by strangers looking for their Airbnb.
- But the Airbnb they sought was a mile away in a different city in Los Angeles County.
In February, Jack Kilian traveled from Chicago to Los Angeles to film a music video for a rapper. For the trip, he rented an Airbnb for three nights in West Hollywood, from a host appropriately named Hollywood Home.
Kilian arrived in LA, picked up a rental car, and navigated to the address listed on the Airbnb property's profile.
That address was the home of Jeff Palkevich, who told Insider he was headed into his apartment with his dog, Buttercup, when he spotted Kilian and two others in his driveway looking lost.
Kilian was confused. The address matched the Airbnb listing, but the exterior photos didn't.
He wasn't the first to find himself in this situation. Starting in April 2022, Palkevich said, strangers would arrive at his complex three to four times a week, looking for an Airbnb that wasn't there.
"It is a steady thing that happens," Palkevich told Insider in February. "I will see someone just standing in the driveway with luggage, scrolling through their phone, trying to figure out what's going on. At this point, I'll just ask, 'Are you looking for an Airbnb?' And the answer, 100% of the time, is yes."
Kilian checked Airbnb and realized he had missed a message from the host, which included the Airbnb's actual address — a mile away. Palkevich told Kilian that he'd been scammed.
For nearly a year, Palkevich and the other residents of his apartment complex were caught in the middle of a "bait and switch" on Airbnb, in which a host provides one address in the listing and then notifies guests at the last minute that the listing is actually somewhere else. If the guest misses the message, they can end up at a stranger's home.
Kilian said the switch didn't ruin his stay: Aside from the wrong location, the rest of the property was accurately portrayed in the listing. But two other guests who got a last-minute address change from Hollywood Home told Insider it ruined their trips to Los Angeles.
Hollywood Home did not respond to a request for comment.
It was worse for Palkevich and his neighbors. After the stream of misguided guests began arriving, it took them more than a year to get Airbnb to address the issue — which it did only after inquiries from an Insider reporter.
Palkevich and his neighbors were frustrated by the constant stream of strangers
Palkevich and his family live in one of eight units that form a complex in West Hollywood, a city that borders Beverly Hills and is surrounded on all other sides by the city of Los Angeles. Hollywood Home had been using the complex's address for more than one of its 29 listings on Airbnb, so Palkevich said he and his neighbors had all dealt with strangers arriving at their properties.
"A lot of times, I'm going to get in my car to pull out of my driveway, and we're blocked in because there's a van full of people looking for their Airbnb," Palkevich said. "Or you're taking the garbage out and someone's asking, 'Which of these units is the one on Airbnb?'"
Residents started a group chat where neighbors could warn one another when Airbnb guests were at the complex, Palkevich said. Most of the guests were understanding when he explained what was going on, he said, but a few people yelled at him, accusing him of involvement in the false listing.
"It's just a constant nuisance," he said.
Using incorrect addresses could help hosts avoid LA's short-term-rental laws
Because of concerns about Airbnb's effect on the availability of rental housing, many cities, including Los Angeles, have placed restrictions on short-term rentals.
In November 2019, the city of Los Angeles implemented a home-sharing ordinance that requires hosts to register with the city and limits home-sharing to primary residences. It also made home-sharing in rent-stabilized and affordable housing illegal.
To circumvent those restrictions, some hosts use addresses outside the city's borders, said Allison Kirste, a policy analyst and advocate for Better Neighbors LA, a coalition that aims to protect housing for Los Angeles residents.
Kirste told Insider that's likely what Hollywood Home was doing by using Palkevich's address in West Hollywood.
In August, Better Neighbors LA looked into Hollywood Home, which previously went by the Airbnb username Dumitrita, and concluded that at least 11 of its listings violated the city's home-sharing ordinance.
"The addresses that the host was actually using to operate these short-term rentals were rent-stabilized buildings in Hollywood," she said.
Better Neighbors LA wrote a letter about Hollywood Home to the Los Angeles city attorney and the Department of City Planning, which told the organization it was looking into the host. As of March, however, Better Neighbors LA had not been made aware of any citations to the properties.
In a statement to Insider, the Department of City Planning said that "warning letters for non-compliance with the home-sharing regulations were sent to the property owner" and that the properties were referred to the Los Angeles Housing Department for the issuance of a citation.
From February 2021 to February 2023, Kirste said, Better Neighbors LA reported more than 50 short-term rentals that it said violated the home-sharing ordinance in Los Angeles. The rentals span multiple hosts; not all are using bait-and-switch tactics, but many are, she said.
"Almost every complaint that we get now is bait and switch," Kirste said. "We realize it's a new way for people to get around the rules of the city's law."
These situations extend far beyond Los Angeles. Insider recently reported on Airbnb guests who faced last-minute changes to their stays' addresses in locations as far-flung as Houston and the country of Montenegro.
Instead of taking down the listings, Airbnb asked Palkevich to write to the host himself
Palkevich first reached out to Airbnb to report the listings last April. The company responded by asking him to write out his complaint in a letter, which it would share with the host. Palkevich was concerned about that, as he didn't want the host to have his personal information.
He reached out to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Police Department to see what action he could take. Both departments advised him not to write the letter, agreeing that he was right to be concerned about sharing his personal information with a stranger he was suspicious of, he said.
The sheriff's department declined to comment on Palkevich's situation. The Los Angeles Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Palkevich said the sheriff's department told him the case couldn't be considered identity theft since the host wasn't using Palkevich's or his neighbors' names. It also told him he couldn't file a harassment complaint against the host, since it was technically the guests who were harassing him.
"It seems like there aren't laws written to do anything about this yet," Palkevich said. "And that's where I'm stuck."
When Insider first viewed Hollywood Home's Airbnb profile in January, it had 29 properties listed. Forty-four of its 358 reviews, dating back to June, mentioned an incorrect address.
After being contacted by Insider about the host and the properties, an Airbnb representative told Insider an investigation had been conducted and all 29 listings were removed from the site. Insider confirmed that they were no longer viewable.
Kirste and her team argue that Airbnb should be picking up on and investigating suspicious listings faster.
"In almost every instance of a bait and switch that we've seen so far, there's been at least one review that said, 'We had to drive somewhere else because it wasn't at the address that Airbnb provided to us. The host told us to go somewhere else,'" Kirste said. "In those cases, we think that that has to be something that Airbnb, other platforms, or the city-planning department should be able to catch."
The Airbnb representative said the company prohibited bait-and-switch tactics and had a team dedicated to investigating bad actors and providing support to guests. They said the company made "significant investments in defenses designed to keep bad actors from accessing our platform in the first place, as well as actions to crack down on deceptive behavior."
2 travelers told Insider the bait and switches ruined their LA trips
One of Hollywood Home's 44 negative reviews came from Jasmine Alvarez. For Halloween weekend, she traveled from Oakland, California, to meet 11 friends for three nights in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse in West Hollywood.
Alvarez, 24, told Insider her group specifically chose the West Hollywood location because it was within walking distance of bars, a Target, and the neighborhood's famous Halloween festivities.
"Then the week comes, and they send me the actual address — miles away from everything that we wanted to do," Alvarez said.
With the short notice and the holiday weekend, Alvarez's group wasn't able to find a similarly sized Airbnb. They were stuck with the property and had to rely on Uber all weekend to get around, she said.
Alvarez reported the listing to Airbnb and received a $315 refund on her group's $1,492 stay. That didn't even cover the roughly $400 the group spent on Uber rides for the weekend, she said.
"It was a lot of money that was wasted," she said. "That's where Airbnb kind of lost me as a customer."
Jeff Spritz, 64, said he'd also soured on Airbnb, after booking a three-bedroom, two-bath townhouse with Hollywood Home in December.
A former West Hollywood resident who now lives in Chicago, Spritz was traveling with his wife and two sons to care for his father, who was in hospice at the time. He chose Hollywood Home's property because it appeared to be in a familiar location.
A few days before Spritz arrived, he got a message similar to those received by Alvarez and Kilian. The actual address, it said, was on Tamarind Avenue in Los Angeles. When the family arrived at the property, it found the block littered with garbage and mattresses.
Spritz's son refused to stay at the Airbnb, ultimately staying at his grandfather's home, while the rest of the family stuck it out in the Airbnb.
"I was so embarrassed," Spritz said.
In West Hollywood, he had hoped his family could go on evening walks or stop for breakfast at local cafés, but "we weren't going to be able to have a walk around there," he said, adding: "It was just too depressing."
Spritz said he reported the listing to Airbnb on one of the final days of his stay, out of concern for future guests. The company gave Spritz a full refund for the stay, which he said cost more than $1,000.
He called it a "live-and-learn situation" and said he planned to be more diligent when looking for Airbnbs.
The stream of strangers at Palkevich's door finally stopped a couple of weeks after Airbnb pulled Hollywood Home's listings in response to Insider's inquiry. But he fears they could return, perhaps if the host is able to make another account under a new name.
Even if this is the end of his issue, Palkevich, who has previously used Airbnb for trips, said he had resolved to never use Airbnb again. "Not in a million years," he said.