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

[Sarah977]

@Anthony1092  Honestly, do you really think a guest cares about your personal finances, whether you can afford to pay your mortgage or not? Do you care whether maybe they just lost their job, too, and need the refund to pay their mortgage?

[Anthony1092]

It’s not about “caring” it’s about agreeing to something and not pretending like it’s unfair when those chickens come home to roost.

Maybe we both do have mortgages.  But when we agreed for me to host them in my home, we agreed that they would pay 50% if something came up...

it did.

[GoodHart-Realty0]

BIG FACTS!

[Emily1161]

For #3:

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2728/what-options-do-i-have-for-canceling-a-reservation-for-a-pl...

[Frank35]

Dear Andrew,

well written post, thanks a lot! One way or another it boils down to this: if AirBnB is a community, AirBnB has to figure out a way to share the (financial) burden. Because for a pretty large group of hosts, it would be absolutely devastating to be forced into accepting 100% refunds (and not even having a say in the decision process).

Being a community means sharing the burden and the solution is simple math: if a group of ten people book a long weekend for EUR 1000 and are only being refunded with 50%, they end up paying EUR 50 each. Which is a bummer but its not the end of the world.

But if a host loses the full amount of EUR 1000 and this happens over a period of lets say 3 to 6 months, we will not have a community of hosts anymore, because a lot of these hosts, a lot of US will be gone and out of business.

[Wendy128]

Completely agree Frank. Before Airbnb unilaterally imposed the ‘extenuating circumstances’ policy I had been offering guests a 50/50 split on cancellation despite my strict cancellation conditions. It seemed only fair considering we’d all, guests and hosts alike, be paying in terms of health risk otherwise. Pity Airbnb didn’t take that view. 

[Norene1]

Did your guests agree to a 50% reduction? I have a strict cancellation policy and had considered offering 80% refund plus paying the service fee if guests cancel. Is that considered outrageous on my part? Unfair, illegal...please some feedback and not just telling me I'm being outrageous in asking this of guests. I am loosing well over half my yearly income by returning 100% but could almost...almost cover my base costs with keeping 20%.

[Sarah977]

@Norene1  That doesn't seem outrageous to me. But who knows how guests will react. Some may feel it's quite fair, some may not. It's worth offering that, at least. Maybe you could also offer to apply that 20% to a future booking from them. 

[Margy6]

Absolutely agree. This is a global problem - guests, hosts, Airbnb all need to share the burden. As a host, I have lost nearly all my income for the rest of 2020. I'm sure I'm not alone. I don't understand why an 80/20 rule wasn't adopted, for example. A 20% cancellation charge for guests would not be a huge burden for them but it might just keep hosts afloat so we have accommodation to offer when all this over.. Airbnb isn't going to be a sustainable business if there are no hosts to offer accommodation.

[Trudi15]

20% of my income of reservations made will do nothing. We are dead in the water for the foreseeable future. I have not had a new booking in over 4 weeks, also not for the summer. We are normally fully booked. Wake up AiBNB management, you recent response is way toooo little.

[Norene1]

20% would most certainly help me.

[Nick-and-Jackie0]

Hi @Anonymous,

Thank you for bringing up these points with @Aisling . The points you have raised are points we would like answers to also.

We as host understand the change in policy for reservations up to 14th April 2020. Although it is difficult to loose reservations in their entirety, we appreciate that there was not much else Airbnb could have done given the rapid changing situation.

However if this policy of offering a full refund extends, we as hosts will not survive financially. We have many costs involved in running and maintaining the properties and have financial responsibilities for our housekeepers, gardeners, pool workers, etc.
We would not cope if the 100% refund policy was to continue.

Obviously we appreciate that the guests are not to blame for this pandemic either, however that is what travel insurance is for.

The cut off date of 14th April with currently no update for what will happen after then is proving to be an issue also. We have guests contacting us regarding their reservations over the next three months who want to cancel now and expect a full refund.

When we explain that this is not possible, they tell us that they will wait for Airbnb to extend the qualifying date for the Extenuating circumstances policy and then they will cancel with no loss to them.
Guests feel we are deliberately not refunding them now, but will be forced to at a later date. We pride ourselves on having a great rapport with our guests, but this is creating an us v them situation.

We are not trying to be cut throat about it, but we have to be sensible. Everyone is going to loose during this pandemic. It just needs to be fair and spread to minimise the impact on anyone group.

Airbnb must remember for it to function and work it needs hosts just as much as travellers!

We do need some guidance and answers from @Airbnb now. Even if these plans change. We need to have answers and information to give our clients.

Thanks again

Kind regards

Nick and Jackie

[Dina548]

@Nick-and-Jackie0  Sorry, but I must disagree. When you decide to be a host, you have to accept all the advantages and disadvatages, as well as the risks of that role. Hosting is not the only business on the world that is affected with this situation. What is happening with other jobs, for example doctors, architects, lawyers, professors, economists, ITs (that are your guests and that are working hard to pay accommodations)? Do you really think that they are not affected with current situation and that host’s money is more valuable than the other profession’s hard earned money? In my opinion, the point is not about money, it is about the basic human characteristics that everyone of us is showing at the moment. Even if I don’t get my refund, I will never rebook those apartments, because, those hosts are not good people, and I will keep hoping that something bad is going to happen to them if there is some life justice. 

Greetings,

D

[Nick-and-Jackie0]

@Dina548 

In reply to your opening comment:
When you decide to be a traveller, you have to accept all the advantages and disadvantages, as well as the risks of that role. Travelling is not the only activity in the world that is affected with this situation! Maybe you should consider this before you accuse hosts of being selfish!

I really think you should re-read my post. We are not suggesting that hosting is the only profession effected by this nor that the host’s money is more valuable than the other profession’s hard earned money. 

As hosts, we are suggesting that there has to be a middle ground where everyone can share the burden of this terrible situation. We are not only thinking of our money, but we do employ housekeepers, gardeners, pool technicians, maintenance engineers and others. If nothing comes in then nobody gets paid! If nobody gets paid, then the economy in the area/region dive bombs even further. This is amplified if you account for many areas on Airbnb are seasonal.

Regarding your comment 'I will keep hoping that something bad is going to happen to them if there is some life justice'. We think this says a lot more about you than them.

[Dina548]

Dear Nick and Jackie,

Travelers are clients that want to feel respected and protected for the money they pay. I am sure that everyone would refuse to pay or would complain if he gets meal or drink in a dirty plate or glass at the restaurant. Also, I am pretty sure that none would buy broken table at the furniture shop. So the situation with guests and their accommodations is the same, none wants to pay for something that he won’t get, especially if he must risk his health.  

I did not say that hosts are selfish, those are your words. 🙂

As I told before, I am the host as you are, and I live on the Adriatic sea coast, so I know really good what seasonal tourism means. I will lose a lot of earnings as other hosts, but if it is the price of someones potential death or someones health risk, then it is so cheap for me. If I would earn money on someones ‘no choice option’ trust me, that I would be scared to buy food with that money. 

I am really happy that you understood my last paragraph of previous post, because I mean that. 

This discussion has no point, because Airbnb is not answering and sharing useful information, so in the future I am not going to waste my time on reading unethical contents. And for sure I am not going to re-read those contents as well.

Stay safe,

D