Serving up the finest seventh circle of Support purgatory since 2021
Phone
1-855-424-7262
@Airbnbhelp
Other Contacts
1. Airbnb
Extremely long response times, repetitive copy/paste answers, terrible refund policies and an eye-rolling playbook are just a few of the reasons that ABB reigns King on this hellish list, and there's certainly no shortage of customer service terror that they've inflicted on their 150 million+ users. They've been pretty bad at the Support game for a while now - most notably since the company canned a lot of its staff back in February 2020 after deeming them "non-essential to core business functions" - and they've gone steadily downhill ever since.
Their list of grievances is long and disheartening, but let's showcase some of the major red flags:
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Ignoring people for days on end, regardless of the severity of the complaint
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Denying full refunds to almost anyone, even if it's because of Covid or a natural disaster.
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Letting hosts cancel at the very last second and leaving guests stranded in a foreign city. We're talking about family vacations, graduations, anniversaries, etc. that are just totally ruined because of this, and the worst part is that they don't help anyone relocate.
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Letting bad-acting guests and hosts decide if they want to compensate the other party for their bad behavior. Not a typo folks. If you're a host and a guest ruins your stuff, you almost never get compensated for it unless the guest says it's ok to take it from their security deposit. You can imagine how well that goes.
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Canceling or suspending accounts on a whim without telling people why (including loyal superhosts, who generate the most money for them). When users ask Support about it, they often tell them that they are not obligated to provide them with a reason.
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Copying and pasting around 90% of their messages from a script, regardless of the situation, which is often tone-deaf.
And when I say they deny refunds to almost anyone, I wasn't exaggerating.
As hinted above, their @Airbnbhelp Twitter handle is nearly useless even in the midst of emergency situations, so your best bet is to call them if you're willing to stomach 1-2 hours of hold time. Don't count on that to help much either though since they'll typically put you through an endless maze and give you canned responses in an effort to get you to give up. Often the best (and only) solution is to dispute any questionable charges with your credit card or to sue them in Small Claims Court - the latter of which may be helpful if you have damages inflicted on your home.
CEO Brian Chesky has known about this problem for a very long time and has swept it under a rug despite numerous pleas for change. Even he admits that "reliability is Airbnb's Achilles Heel" but has chosen to purely focus on product design and new features despite that. That's certainly a losing strategy for any service platform, and it makes you wonder how long he can keep this charade going without feeling the consequences at some point.
Hotels are a much more reliable (and safer) option these days, so if you run into problems then take it as a sign from the short-term rental gods that it's your time to move on and don't look back. If you do need to use Airbnb as a guest though, maybe for a large group, then you absolutely MUST book with a Superhost to effectively minimize your chances of disaster.
Satan Score:
5.0
TrustPilot:
BBB.org:
Phone
None. Seriously.
@Uber_Support
Other Contacts
2. Uber
If you love getting terrible Support from sharing economy platforms then you're in for another treat, because Uber virtually uses the same head-scratching playbook that Airbnb does. Like ABB, the company has no shame in leaving their customers in the dust, and you're bound to see hundreds or even thousands of unresolved complaints against them on Twitter on any given day. The bulk of these pertain to cold/undelivered food items, faulty ride cancelation charges, and ongoing months-long driver background checks, but I've literally seen it all from this company so the madness doesn't end there. As far as I can tell, it's been this way for a long time and it continues to get worse, to the detriment of their 75 million+ global users. And even more discouraging is that CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has no plans in sight to fix this whatsoever, so the future doesn't look any brighter.
Bots and canned responses are a staple from their extremely unhelpful @Uber_Support Twitter handle (another uncanny similarity to @AirbnbHelp), and since the company's been "ramping up phone support in select locations" since October 2019, you can't even call them even during an emergency, which people tend to want to do, ya know? It's just a total nightmare whether you're dealing with a ride or a food issue or a background check, and you're better off with Lyft, Via, Seamless, DoorDash or Delivery.com because of it.
On top of that, it's also extremely difficult to get refunds even if the fault clearly lies on them, a driver or a restaurant, so you'll often need to dispute these with your credit card company. Here's what their generic response typically is in this situation, which I've dubbed the Refundless Message of Doom™:
Apparently Uber thinks that we should just pay it forward and rate the restaurant instead of giving a hoot about getting fair compensation for this. This is one of the laziest cop outs you'll ever find from a Support Department and it just goes to show how things are run over there.
They don't really fight credit card disputes very often so you'll probably get your money back, but why should you have to go through that hassle in the first place? There are plenty of better options out there (especially for food delivery), so make sure to use them.
Satan Score:
5.0
TrustPilot:
BBB.org:
Phone
1 (877) 227-7481
@ExpediaHelp
@TravelocityHelp
@OrbitzCareTeam
@HotelsComHelp
@Trivago
@Hotwire
@Egencia
@vrbo
@ebookers
@CheapTickets
Other Contacts
3. Expedia Group
If we combined all 13 of Expedia Group's support-deficient companies and reviewed them as a conglomerate, they would almost certainly be #1 on this list. But for simplicity's sake let's just use Expedia as the shining beacon of despair.
For those of you who are curious, here's their whole list of grave Support offenders:
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Expedia
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Travelocity
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Orbitz
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Hotels.com
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Trivago
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Hotwire
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Egencia
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VRBO*
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ebookers
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CheapTickets
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CarRentals.com
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Expedia Cruises
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wotIf
*still better than Airbnb
I don't know why the heck this company follows a "Marketing 100%, Support 0%" mantra, but if you didn't know any better you'd guess that Thanos took an unexpected trip over there and decided to wipe out their entire Support organization one day and they just kept it that way. The common complaint against them on Twitter is these insane call wait times, which you really have to see to believe. We're talking 2, 3, 4 or even TWELVE-hour wait times here folks, which just seems totally unfathomable to me for users in a time-sensitive travel bind. What could this team be doing to keep somebody in a queue for over 720 straight minutes, and does that mean that hundreds of other people are actually waiting that long? It's scary to think about, and it's been this way for a long time now.
Twitter isn't really helpful at any of their companies unfortunately, as you would expect from a firm that spends next to nothing on Customer Service. At Expedia in particular, the @ExpediaHelp Customer Service account is usually an unresponsive mess and takes an eternity to get things resolved (if ever), and it's nothing short of maddening. Thankfully they did spend a lot of time and resources to run a very expensive commercial during the Oscars, work on a sponsored campaign with Joe Jonas and sprinkle Captain Obvious hotels.com advertisements all over the NFL and NBA Playoffs, so I guess that's where their priorities lie.
I totally feel for all of the people who are scrambling to change their travel plans or get a refund from this company or any of their sister companies, and I hope you all succeed at some point. If you're one of the lucky ones and you do not have anything booked with Expedia Group at the moment, avoid all of their companies at all costs and use a different service like Kayak instead. If you're not so lucky though, then be prepared to go the credit card dispute or Small Claims Court route if you must, because your other options are severely limited.
Satan Score:
5.0
TrustPilot:
BBB.org:
Phone
1 (800) 266-2278
@xfinitysupport
Other Contacts
4. Comcast (Xfinity)
You don't have to look very far to find the biggest Customer Service offender in Telecom, and this company has worn it as a badge of honor for nearly two decades now. That's because Comcast - or their mess of a home/TV/internet service called Xfinity - is often the only cable provider in many parts of the U.S. and tons of helpless people are pretty much forced to stomach their lack of timely and/or helpful service.
There are a long list of issues that plague this company's 32 million broadband customers, but the most common ones are below:
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Service outages that last for days or even weeks, with little to no communication or expectations given to Customers in the interim.
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Incredibly poor and disorganized phone support that make it difficult to speak to someone to resolve even the most basic issues.
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Persistent billing discrepancies that are hard to decipher. Often it takes multiple agents hours to figure out why a certain price changed or how to remove a certain (unsolicited) charge.
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Agents that make it notoriously difficult to cancel or downgrade the service. This was famously highlighted in a 2014 phone call where an agent was oppressively denying a refund request, and amazingly, it hasn't gotten much better almost 10 years later.
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A noted lack of empathy among Agents. This is coupled with the fact that the company outsources a lot of its Support staff and trains them to read directly from Scripts for almost all of their responses, much like Airbnb does.
Their @xfinitySupport handle on Twitter is somewhat responsive to complaints, but unfortunately it's a facade since the rest of the process from there on is a convoluted mess. On any given day you're bound to see hundreds or thousands of frustrated people complaining about the same, repetitive problems:
And that's just about what you would expect from a Monopoly that has absolutely zero incentive to change. Even more frustrating is the fact that they had the nerve to raise rates across the board in December 2023 citing "rising programming costs while investing in our network to provide the best, most reliable Internet service in the country". Not only does that reek of corporate buzzword PR spin, but it couldn't be any farther from the truth.
This company hasn't cared about Customer Service for as long as their Internet and Cable service has existed folks, and it's obvious that they never will. If you have any other alternatives - including Starlink internet - you will be SO much better off for it. Avoid this company at all costs.
Satan Score:
5.0
TrustPilot:
BBB.org:
Phone
1 (866) 570-6466
@AmericanAir
Other Contacts
5. American Airlines
We're all well aware that the Airline industry has been considerably bad at the Customer Service game for a while now, as is often the case with Oligopolies. And there's certainly a good chunk of the crew that deserves to be shamed for it. But some of these companies are just a little bit better than the others (or in the rare case of Virgin, a lot better) while others just feel like they're scraping the bottom of the barrel and doing the bare minimum for their customers.
In American's case, it's the latter. Not only do they have one of the worst Trustpilot and Better Business Bureau scores out of any major US airline, but the self-proclaimed "world's largest airline" is notorious for delayed flights and mishandled baggage - both of which they rarely compensate people for even when it's their fault. In the case of the first scenario, which happens a lot, you'll rarely get a food or hotel voucher from the airline and you're pretty much on your own, especially if they force feed you "weather" as the reason for the delay even when the optics are questionable. Every time this has happened to me - including one time where they only gave me 45 minutes notice and forced me to book a hotel room - they refused to give any details on the weather-related issues and kept it completely hush hush. What is there to hide exactly?
And on top of that, as if this wasn't bad enough already, I discovered that the company recently trained their Customer Service Agents to not escalate anything because "frontline agents are now given the authority to make these types of decisions." How fun!
Here it is in writing after I thought I must have misheard it on the phone.
I guess there's a first time for everything, but even the worst CS offenders will at least escalate you to a Supervisor at some point (often to no avail, but still). The fact that AA won't let you do that even for serious time-sensitive issues is troubling at best and just pure evil at worst.
For those of you who know Yours Truly, you know that I wouldn't just accept that at face value and give up. I eventually did get begrudgingly escalated to a Supervisor after a lot of back and forth, but that person ultimately sounded annoyed that I had foiled their company's grand plan to avoid these from happening. She told me that Management was "100% onboard with letting frontline agents make all of these decisions" and actually asked me if I escalated this because I thought I was going to get her to cave. Then she hung up on me and that was that.
Bottom line is, this airline has very little incentive to change and they're certainly one of the worst at Customer Service. If you can fly Delta instead I would choose them in a heartbeat, but if you're stuck with AA then make sure you book the trip on a credit card that has travel insurance. That's what saved me with them multiple times and it may very well save you too.
4.9
Satan Score:
TrustPilot:
BBB.org:
Clawing at the gates
