Community Support during COVID-19

[Aisling]

Hello everyone,

My name is Aisling and I manage our global Community Support Team. Over the past three months, we have been hit by an unprecedented wave of challenges due to the spread of COVID-19.

My job is to ensure that you and the rest of our community have the support you need, especially at this difficult time and make sure we have the resources in place to do so. However, at a time where support is needed even more than ever, our team has been faced with some of the hardest challenges we’ve ever experienced.

In light of this, I wanted to share some of these experiences with you and most importantly what we’ve been doing about it and what we are currently working on.

Sudden and unprecedented volume of calls

As you may know, we have offices and support centers in locations across the world, but we rely on all of them to help with the volume of support we receive. The challenges we’ve seen here are:

• Our China team was the first to be impacted, dealing with volumes 600% above what we had planned for. The quarantine shut down our China office and one of our Customer Support sites.
• Once the WHO announced COVID-19 as a global pandemic, our global ticket volumes rose 400% above what we planned.

What’ve we done:

• The China team contributed over 100K of working hours during the Lunar New Year to manage the call volumes. We also built a self-solve and chat bot tool to manage the volume in just two weeks
• Our teams rallied and formed a task force, covering operations, engineering, legal and partner management teams, that met multiple times a day to tackle the issue

Office shutdowns

As the virus spread, all of our internal offices were required to shut down quite abruptly and all of our teams had to change to a work from home mode.

• Our partner sites where we manage the majority of tickets were also required to be shut down by the government and local authorities. This meant we temporarily lost almost 80% of our global community support network within days.

What’ve we done:

• We had to get laptops enabled and distributed to 7,000 specialists across 25 sites around the world.
• Within a matter of one week, we had moved around 70% of partner specialists to working from home

Where are we now

We’ve done a lot in a short period of time, but as you can imagine we are still working through our backlog.

• We are currently working through technical and regional constraints to enable all of our teams to connect to the phone lines.
• We are under pressure on our phone lines, in particular English and Portuguese.
• As a result, we have shortened hours of operations temporarily, but are working to get them back to normal hours as soon as possible.

We also launched a new initiative that temporarily redeploys Airbnb staff to the Community Support team to help us more quickly meet your needs. Things are moving rapidly and so we hope you see a difference in response time very shortly.

Finally...

I am incredibly proud of how our teams have rallied together in such a short amount of time to serve our community and we are all working around the clock to continue to support you.

I can’t imagine how difficult it has been for all of you with these unprecedented changes. We are here to listen and support you as much as we can. Please continue to share your feedback here in the Community Center and also through the listening sessions, I've been receiving regular updates from the community team. I will keep you posted with further updates.

Thank you for your support and patience while we get our team back on track and adjust to this new world.

Aisling

[Trudi15]

 I am a bad person because as a host with strict cancellation rules - a) airbnb unilaterally told me I had to accept no fee for all reservations through arbitrary April 15 ? b) that I am supposed to take full hit for cancellations now for June, July, August?

Sorry. Yes we are all hit, this means we have to share the burden. Hosts who do not agree to accept 100 % no cancellation fee are not bad people. Airbnb needs a policy where they cover us as well as guests.

[Aisling]

Hi @Anonymous , Thank you for taking the time to read and sharing such a detailed and constructive response. I'll do my best to address each one of your questions.

1. We have a separate and dedicated team of experts (not affected by COVID-19 responses) working on urgent safety concerns 24/7. If you have noise or party concerns, we recommend 2 options our Safety Center or Neighbor Support Line - designed to support you during these use cases of parties/safety risk. You can log this in our neighborhood tool at airbnb.com/neighbors (currently not global, but in many countries). Our Safety Center is a resource for guests and hosts to learn more about how to stay safe on their trip. Additionally, for active reservations starting 1 day before check-in and ending 1 day after check-out, we offer the ability to call a member of our safety team via our Urgent Support Line for urgent safety issues.

2 & 3. I know that you are all anxious to hear what the next steps to our Extenuating Circumstances policy is given little signs of the pandemic slowing down. We have a dedicated team working around the clock to ensure we get this right before announcing any changes. We aim to have an update this week. 

4. This is a great question. We originally created this space for our community to connect and support each other. I totally hear that some more support is needed, so I will be working with Lizzie, Stephanie, Quincy and the rest of the team to ensure I get the top feedback, questions you may have around Community Support and will do my best to proactively share more updates so you all feel informed and have the right tools to self solve.

Thanks again,
Aisling

[Susan3633]

Is there any way to fix this issue?  I requested cancellation week before last from my host under the Covid-19 reason for my May 11 trip.  He denied my request since he said it was outside of Airbnb's Apr. 14 policy.  He may consider my request again, but I am not able to request it again, so I'm stuck and he's not doing anything about trying to go back to the email and undo the denial to approve it.  He says he hasnt gotten another request......because I can't send another one!  So frustrating!  I'm in Louisiana, and things are in crisis stage.  I cannot take this trip.  Any suggestions?  I just want my deposit back.  We have been out of work.

Why do you need to cancel?

Please select a reason

I don’t want to travel because of COVID-19 (coronavirus)I no longer need accommodationsI made the reservation by accidentI have a documented extenuating circumstanceMy host needs to cancelI’m uncomfortable with the hostMy travel dates changedOther

You’ve already sent a cancellation request to Dennis. Please select another reason to continue—we’ll give you the service fee as a coupon for your next trip, and the rest will be refunded according to your host’s cancellation policy.

[Ken399]

With respect to the latest (March 31)  announcement from AirBB.  To CEO Brian Chesky....   

AirBB hosts are not just your partners, they are your customers.  You emphatically said it yourself- travel has grinded to a halt globally.  How is it this is a safety/health issue if nobody is travelling?  What pressure are our customers facing to travel if its against the law to travel?  

And- you are still not asking us, you are telling us.  How about splitting the cancellation cost 1/3 each?  Or better, crack open that stuffed AirBB wallet and pay 100%....  Or did I not understand that patronizing confusing message...  ?

[Leigh48]

#2 is especially to the point for a host. Thank you Andrew

[Sarah977]

@Aisling  Thank you for this message. One thing that has been upsetting many guests and hosts is a message being sent out to guests saying "Due to an incident in XX (fill in the name of the town where the listing is) ...."

In most or many cases, there has been no "incident" in these places- so the message is blatantly false. And it's freaking out a lot of guests and confusing and angering Hosts. There is no need whatsoever for a message like that and it should be removed ASAP.  The last thing anyone needs right now is false information being spread, when many people are already panicked enough as is.

[Lawrene0]

It was removed from the last few cancellations I received, @Sarah977 . I think the coders have caught up on that one.

[Sarah977]

@Lawrene0  Oh, good news. I did flag that issue to Stephanie the other day, and I'm sure they've been getting lots of feedback flak over it from all quarters, so hopefully it's removed across-the-board.

[Lizzie]

Thanks @Lawrene0 and @Sarah977. Yes we flagged this last week or maybe even the week before and had heard it was in the works.

Thanks for confirming it all sorted now (phew) and for the initial feedback. : ) 

[Dina548]

Airbnb should extend COVID 19 policy, because with dates like this hosts are allowed to do whatever they want for reservations after 14th of April. Unfourtunately, seems like they just care about money and show 0 empathy. I had to cancel my 4 bookings in last 2 months, and only 1 host understood that I feel unsafe to travel during the COVID 19 and that in my opinion it is non ethic to travel at this moment when people around you are dying and it is so easy to spread the virus. Guess what 3 other hosts did? Forced me to travel during pandemic (one of my bookings was Milan). Still 2 of my bookings are not refunded and my flights are canceled. Hosts are ignoring me and talking just about official policy and Airbnb is not responding.

Extending dates is useful for everyone:

-guests would feel protected and would rebook after pandemic for sure

-hosts should know that business is not important and that earning money at someones bad position can not be good. I am also the host and I have been closed my apartments for reservations when the COVID 19 has started

-Airbnb would be under less pressure with messages and requests, and should answer to some more important requests, beacuse there are a lot of other problems, not only coronavirus related requests 

Greetings and stay safe,

Dina

[Yinuo0]

I could not agree more!!! The policy is you can only cancel if you booked before March 14 the check in date is between March 14 and April 14.  Well I booked in Feb. when situation was much less serious, but my check in date is in May. Therefore I can't get any refund. And the host started to disappear at the moment I mentioned refund. And now I'm still trying to get in touch with the customer support team..... To him, he can already get money, why bother speaking to the traveler? This is such an irresponsible thing to do, however it happens too often. Really hope the cancel policy can be extended!

[Nicolas1166]

@Dina548 @Yinuo0  Totally agree. I am in the same situation. Host has just rejected my refund request. 50% of my reservation is already paid. I cannot retrieve this payment unless Airbnb takes action to extend its policy beyond 14 April. A 50% upfront payment is fine in normal scenarios, but it cannot bind the parties in the context of an international pandemic where all flights are cancelled and home-confinement applies. This is clearly a force majeure scenario.  @Airbnb what can you do to help ?

[Juan63]

You are being a little selfish yourself Dina and also assuming the worst of people when you don't even know them. Your suggestion by far helps you out, not most hosts. You agreed to the set policies when you booked, didn't buy insurance and now you expect hosts to carry 100% of the burden. Your hosts are right to take the slow approach instead of a blanket refund policy. You are also an adult and no one is forcing you to travel. Seems you want everyone to be responsible, but the guest, not so much.

[Nick-and-Jackie0]

We 100% agree @Juan63 ,
We have many guests requesting to cancel and receive a full refund for reservations in May and June. And when we tell them this is not possible they are not understanding at all.

Yes we do not want to take advantage of the guests and take their money, but we will not survive if we just blanket refund all the reservations. 

@Dina548 you must appreciate that this pandemic is not either the travellers fault nor the hosts. As hosts we have financial responsibilities for our properties and the people whom we use for housekeeping, gardening, pool and other services. If we loose 100% of the revenue for the next 2-3 months, we would all loose our businesses and the other people mentioned above would also have no income. Many of the locations on Airbnb are seasonal locations and if there is no revenue or work during the season, the whole region will suffer.
The burden of cost needs to be spread. This is why a 100% refund will not work and one of the reasons why travel insurance was created.

I understand your stress and disappointment, but it is not the hosts v you. 

Regards

Nick

[Ken399]

Why not split the overall cost 3 ways... Customer, AirBB, and hosts?