Airbnb no longer tells hosts what the complaint is?

[Daniel9590]

First time post, been hosting since 2014 and have been in the restaurant, bar, and hotel industry my whole life. I was wondering if anyone has ever seen this before….

Backstory: I own 4 STRs and I manage another 7. All homes are professionally cleaned between each guest, and inspected before and after the clean by me or my one employee. I have been a superhost for 7+ years running and have never seen this.

Guest says they feel unsafe and are leaving due to “people walking around”, and some homeless people walking down the street outside the gates of the condo complex. Never had this complaint, ever, and if you live in Austin, you would know that there are homeless people everywhere.

Guest apparently doesn’t get the answer she wants from airbnb so she pivots to cleanliness issues and claims her niece found a piece of gum behind a bed, on a wall behind a bed, the only cleanliness issue mentioned to me, but she had already left the property. Airbnb refunded the guest 100% for ”cleanliness issue” a day later without contacting me at all.

Here’s the kicker….Airbnb refuses to tell me what the issue was and will not provide me the “documents” submitted by the guest. So if there was an issue (which I’m 99% certain there was not), they will not tel me what it was to fix it. There’s no way this is really their policy, right? If the guest checks in this weekend and has the same issue ,which I have no idea what it was, will airbnb refund them again and not tell me what it was.

We all know that airbnb sides with the guest about 80% of the time (in my experience), but this takes it to a whole other level. Is this what we should expect with guest aircover?

Open to all advice in dealing with this ridiculousness.

[Huma0]

@Daniel9590 

No, this is not new. Have a browse through this CC and you will find may similar stories. When it is handled by Airbnb's 'trust and safety' department, it seems that they do not feel any obligation to disclose relevant/important information to the host, not to consult the host for their side of the story. 

However, there have been recent changes to the guest refund policy and this is something that you should really acquaint yourself with. Again, there are lots of threads discussing this topic. The information published said that Airbnb might contact the host and give them the chance to prove their case but the wording suggested that they didn't have to.

More disturbing still is the number of hosts (including long standing Superhosts with hundreds of amazing reviews) getting suddenly suspended from the platform and not being able to get any answer from Airbnb as to why. How is anyone supposed to resolve a problem if they do not know what the problem is? This seems to be happening more and more frequently.