if the listing advertised “high-speed internet” or anything with the wording “high-speed”, then i’d call AirBNB and complain until i either got a partial refund or a rebooking elsewhere. Rate 1-star and post as many complaints as possible on as many social media outlets as possible with the full name of the AirBnB host. Name and Shame.

Basically, be as big a nightmare as possible (without getting kicked out) until either it gets fixed or until you get enough money back to make you feel better.

edit:

The owners live upstairs.

i wouldn’t let them sleep a wink until that’s 50Mb/s+ both up and down. should be at least 100Mb/s, but 50Mb/s is manageable.

They’re fucking you while on vacation, and i would make their live a LIVING HELL. being cheap has consequences…

Re you’re edit: I’m not here on vacation, I’m here to go to the Mayo clinic. But they close up at 3, so it would be nice to come back to decent wifi. Thankfully, I realized I can just use my phone as a hotspot. The only problem is my iPhone and my Mint Linux notebook won’t play nice, so I have to tether one to the other via USB to get it to work rather than via the WiFi connection. No idea why, but it won’t get to the authentication part when I connect to the WiFi. But that’s better than what I had before.

to me, that makes it even more egregious. i’d send them a bill for your data plan, and i’d also browbeat them for putting someone critically ill, who is visiting the mayo clinic, until they got the issue fixed immediately.

some people think they can take advantage of people like you and your mother, and i’d make sure they never did that again, not to anyone, ever.

i’d get on the phone with AirBnB and be such a unimaginable nightmare, that they’d do anything just to shut me up.

i’ve been extremely successful at this.

edit: i once had a similar issue at a crappy hotel with bad internet service. i called their corporate office and threatened a federal lawsuit and had a lawyer buddy of mine throw some legalese at them (an obvious bluff). had them shook. 5 minutes later, the “we can’t do anything” magically turned into “oh, we fixed the problem” and my internet speed was magically fixed.

sometimes, you just havae to out-asshole the asshoels to get what you paid for.