Foolish Airbnb "threatened to suspend the account"

[Ted366]

Airbnb org tells me I must hold my property available with an open calendar to be available to the Ukrainians that are currently applying to come to Canada, for many of them they will not have a place to stay even if the war ends due to demolished buildings, unexploded bombs etc. Furthermore the idiots at Airbnb tell me if I decline any more inquiries such as the one received today they will delist my account so I needed to ask the inquiry to respect that the Ukrainians are in a bad situation and I am trying to do what I can to help them. 

Call Airbnb customer service they all they they can do is say wow congrats on being a superhost, then say cant do anything, say Airbnb systems are useless nothing more they can but I can give feedback, wow. 

Chesky wants all the positive media attention over the Ukrainian effort but despite being a multiple billionaire cant run an organization with capable systems nor train his customer service reps who can NEVER escalate anything. 

Does anyone have a capable manager level or better contact at Airbnb?  Thanks 

[Ann72]

You signed up to host through Airbnb.org?  Can you get out of that?  Sounds like other hosts are having problems there, too - see what Patricia wrote here:  https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Airbnb-org-Community/Hosting-Ukrainian-refugees-for-no-financial...

[Mark116]

@Ann72  All I know is that I can't get out of it!  About half way through creating the airbnb.org listing, I became annoyed at the idea of having to totally recreate everything from scratch, e.g.no way to mirror the existing listing,  load and caption all the photos again+I got that feeling that despite my wish to help Ukrainian refugees, I would regret listing on Airbnb.org.  Gues what?  There is NO WAY to delete the unfinished listing!!! Airbnb told me the only way I could delete it would be spend the tedious couple of hours completing the listing, have it go live and then snooze it. ????????  

[Ann72]

Oh. My. God @Mark116.  That is a nightmare!!!  I would seriously want to kill someone.  I can't stand staring at something I don't want anymore.  I hope you get it snoozed and out of sight soon!

[Sarah977]

@Ted366  I know this doesn't address the main issue, but is important to know in general so you don't run afoul of Airbnb's idea that we should just accept all bookings, no matter how inappropriate.

If you are declining Inquiries, as opposed to Booking Requests, you should stop doing that. 

There is no requirement to either pre-approve nor decline an Inquiry. All you need to do is to message the inquirer back within 24 hours. 

Requests are different- you do have to either acccept or decline within 24 hours, but you can also explain to the guest why you can't accept and ask them to withdraw the Request. If they do that before the 24 hr. response window is up, you won't have to decline.

[Ted366]

I put the property on request only, I altered my first line description to state it is only for UKRAINIAN refugees and still I got requests. So had to decline thought Airbnb had enough common sense to know how to allow for this given they are milking all the free media attention over this effort. But alias no they have not when I called to say please fix this as I am trying to do the right thing the customer rep said sorry cant help, meanwhile Chesky is on TV stations telling the world how great he is. 

[Sybe]

Hi @Ted366 @Mark116 ! I know it's been a while but I wanted to check in with this as we asked for some clarification regarding keeping your calendar open.

If you opt in your listing for Airbnb.org, as you know both Airbnb and Airbnb.org will use the same calendar for booking stays. If it's been booked by Airbnb guests it won't be available for Airbnb.org guests and vice versa.

You don't need to decline booking requests or cancel existing bookings, though it is preferred to keep the dates available just in case. If you wish to only receive Airbnb.org bookings however, you can create a new Airbnb.org only listing and perhaps snooze the listing on Airbnb to prevent requests from coming in.

@Mark116 regarding your issue with deleting the unfinished listing, do you have a ticket open with Airbnb.org support that we could perhaps give a small push?

I hope this makes sense, and I want to give a huge thank you to all of you for your continued efforts in supporting those in need. 🙏