My family has owned a vacation rental business for almost 25 years and Airbnb is all but destroying it this year. After multiple attempts and hours of time spent, I finally was able to reach a customer service rep (if you can call them that) to ask questions about the extenuating service policy. I’ve had multiple guests that need to cancel last minute due to state mandated travel restrictions and guests testing positive to Covid. Airbnb is doing NOTHING to help hosts navigate their policies. Why should the hosts have to suffer huge losses of income due to THEIR policies? Why isn’t Airbnb providing assistance with lost income to hosts? The service rep hung up on me while I was asking questions about how Airbnb is helping hosts. Has anyone else had similar experiences? What are you doing to navigate this policy? We are losing over $3,000 just THIS WEEK!
Your angst and frustration is widely felt by many hosts. There are many of us who were not too happy with the use of the extenuating circumstances policy before the pandemic, but have been very frustrated by the poor customer service. As a host, I readily agreed to all refund requests related to the pandemic and since the have snoozed my listing until all this dies down. Many hosts cannot afford to do that.