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

[Lizzie]

Hello @Joško5,

Nice to meet you. As you will have read from Aisling's post here that there is a very high volume of people contacting our Support Team at the moment and so it is taking a little longer, but an agent will get back to you as soon as possible.

Is your need urgent? 

[Joško5]

Thanks Lizzie,

I managed to slove my problem.

Regards,

Joško

[Ann783]

I called Airbnb a few days ago to exoress my concerns about a booking with 6 people for a girlfriends weekend. Totally cool before a pandemic - but now unwise. The rep canceled the booking without any penalty to me as the host.   She also advised me on a current issue with a guest. Than you for the update @Aisling 

[Aisling]

That is great to hear @Ann783 . Thank you for hosting in these challenging times!
-Aisling

[Belinda235]

I feel for you. This has been devastating for the whole of the Tourism industry.  But theses cancellations are not the fault of the traveller. 

I am a super host and have refunded all my bookings in complete understanding. I am now caught up myself though, as a traveler, who booked for my sister coming in from overseas before the Travel ban, before March. Since the travel is in June I am not protected by the current refund policy. I have lost thousands in bookings and now because of a mean spirited fellow host who won’t let me cancel, I am losing 500$ more for the exact same reason. Air bnb needs to extend the policy to include Dates past 14 April as the situation has changed. I am speaking as a traveller and a host. Are there plans to revise this policy?

[Bj31]

My girlfriend & I are waiting for an update on AIRBNB’s cancellation policy as we have cancelled our trip to Hawaii due to the “14-day quarantine requirement” for all arrivals to the state effective as of yesterday, March 26. We contacted our hosts Monday, 3/16, to cancel for our check in on 4/18, a month in advance, and they have refused to refund, respectfully. Our now cancelled trip is 22 days away & we have yet to hear an update on the policy. We feel that due to the state of Hawaii requiring all visitors to not leave our designated quarantine locations “unless it is for medical emergencies or to seek medical care,” are grounds for us to receive a full refund.

[Helen427]

@AislingWould you please advise what steps ABB are undertaking to ensure WHO who provide Guidelines and advice to our Governments and authorities are held to account?

When people are advised to "Stay at home" surely to goodness common sense should have prevailed and included the words "if feeling unwell" than to have taken the blanket approach they have, shouldn't it?

We are all in different parts of the world experiencing all the different seasons on the same day.

Today here in New Zealand outside my home it was 32 degrees celsius and people should be allowed to go about their basic legal rights to keep healthy in the way they are accustomed to by being outside swimming, playing games or at their workplaces not confined like prisoners inside on such a nice Autumn day.

In Europe it's coming into Spring, in other parts of the world it's Winter or Summer which are all relevant as to how viruses will spread and impact on people's health and how people cope with illnesses.

Telling people to 'Stay at Home' based on an academic's hypothesis of how this virus may spread when the majority of people simply will not get it is like telling people they have absolutely no Human Rights.

The economic impacts are yet to be recorded and some of these academics who spend their time indoors on their laptops all day must be held to account.

It's a well known fact people, and the world's economy, are 'Better at Work, Living in an inclusive manner and been active outdoors for their overall health.

Someone has made a massive stuff up of how this whole 'Pandemic' has been addressed on an international arena. and must be held to account.

Times have changed considerably since the 1950's when WHO was first founded and they must move with the times with there 'Best Practices'

[Felipe411]

Great.. sun is out so everyone should be enjoying the nice weather.. so we are all young and unable to transmit the disease to seniors who have extremely high death rates with COVID.. very selfish of you... 

I don't like to be a "prisoner" in my own house.. but I do understand that by doing so I am protecting people that are would have their lives threatened... but hey.. the weather outside is amazing.. we should all go for a swim (check what happened in the UK with this approach)

[Juan63]

@Felipe411  I think it’s ridiculous to force everyone to stay home. You can not equate someone taking a walk, following social distancing protocol, to a spring break party. We have to be level headed here and not let fear reduce us to cavemen. 

[Anonymous]

@Helen427   This is not a conspiracy of killjoys determined to ruin your leisure activities.  What makes this virus especially difficult to contain is the unusually long period of time when a carrier without apparent symptoms can infect others. Including the words "if feeling unwell" would be ignorant and irresponsible.

[Juan63]

I think the point is @Anonymous  blanket statements have never been good policy. Going outside in Texas, is much different than going outside in Tokyo. Even parts in Tokyo is different than going outside in downtown Tokyo.  Sweden has taken a very different approach with this. The governor of New York even acknowledged this approach may have not been the best interest to the health of all New Yorkers. 

[Barbara1531]

Airbnb needs to extend their cancellation policy through April and re-evaluate May 1. Covid-19(a ridiculously taboo term on a hosts site) is expanding across the country. Non corporate hosts with a room in their house are at risk, especially those who are retired and in a high risk group. We are unable to cancel a reservation without the draconian penalties of losing hard-earned superhost status. I understand Airbnb is profit oriented and wanted an IPO this year but this head-in-the sand attitude endangers the host community. I want to know if Airbnb is receiving any relief money and will they compensate their hosts in any way? I sympathize with guests who are losing their money and refund my guests. Hotels and airlines are accommodating  changes in travel plans and Airbnb may face a backlash if they do not follow suit for the duration of this crisis. I see accommodations for Covid workers being offered - I trust the hosts recognize the responsibility - leave the space empty for 3-5 days after a stay, clean and wash every linen and surface then disinfect. Many hosts use the same bedspreads and decorative pillows, chair cushions etc. These need to be sanitized between guests too.  I enjoy my experience as a host but find the lack of support at this crucial moment very distressing. Lives are at stake to quote responsible politicians and making a COVID-19 infection the only grounds for penalty free cancellation during the crisis beyond the pale. 

[Coral0]

I fully support the comments from Barbara in Arizona. I have fully refunded my guests cancellations and from mid March until the end of the year we have no bookings even though in Kauai we only have one resident and five visitors who have tested positive. I have not been happy with Airbnb's auto response telling reservations that they are responding to the "crisis in Princeville, Kauai". Our Airbnb unit has made it possible to pay our mortgage and keep our house. That may now be in danger. We are in the retired, high risk group. I would like to know if Airbnb has considered any compensation to hosts. Perhaps a transfer of partial Airbnb's fees to hosts for a period of six to twelve months. How about a year end rebate based on anticipated revenue. Based on your ability to respond to this crisis, it seems much more resourceful than what we can even hope to do. 

[Dina548]

@Nicolas1166  @Yinuo0  @René281 

With this policy I can only conculde that it seems it is safe to travel after 14th of April guys 😂😂😂 haha

[Ciaran22]

@Aisling as a host I have had to accept a number of cancellations, and hope that my guests have all been fully refunded. However my wife and I had to cancel a booking in Prague on 13 March, for a stay commencing 14 March, after the Czech government imposed travel restrictions. We notified Airbnb on 13 March and, two weeks on, have had very limited and infrequent response and NO REFUND.