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

[Virginia176]

The last time I attempted to contact customer support, I never received a response and my concerns were officially dismissed. I have a current problem, and I cannot get support from anyone at airbnb. I have a guest who wants to cancel due to Cover 19. I am onboard with that decision, but he has been unable to cancel. He was told he would receive $0 from me, due to my cancellation policy. He, in fact, sent me a screen shot confirming that was the message that he received from airbnb. This is unbelievable, because, under normal circumstances, he would receive a 50% refund, based on my cancellation policy. I don't know where airbnb is coming up with this stuff.

I would like for him to receive a 100% refund. Our town is shutting down all short term rentals due to Covid-19. I can't get anyone to respond to me, and he has been provided with false information or blatantly deceitful non-facts. He was told he could only receive a voucher for future travel---and, I may add, that travel wouldn't even be for a future trip to my home. That's is not the  way Airbnb has advertised its response to the Covid-19 issue. You all need to get your **bleep** together ASAP and return host as well as guest queries.

[Huma0]

@Virginia176

Are you able to post the screenshot here? I had a similar situation with a guest who should have gotten a partial refund, but was getting a message that she would be charged the full amount and only Airbnb fees would be refunded in the form of travel credit. At the same time, I received an email from Airbnb saying I would receive £0 payout as they were unable to collect funds from the guest. I found this pretty weird, seeing as the guest booked months before and has to pay a chunk upfront.

I did get a response from Airbnb and they told me this was an error, that the guest would not be charged any additional amount for the stay but only after the original check in date.

If your situation is the same, most likely it's just an error that can be sorted.

On the other hand, your guest might be getting a message that is misleading him into thinking he can't get a refund, because I have seen screenshots of similar on other posts here.

[Albert1743]

Hi Aisling, I am Albert from Hong Kong and sent an email to you yesterday > aisling.hassell@airbnb.com asking for help of the refund under COVID 19 as your Customer Support Team turned down my refund request as a guest. I understand you are extremely busy in these days and hope my email could reach you at the above email address asap. If not, please let me know where I can send my email again that can reach you. Much thanks.

[Lydia378]

My mom does Air BnB but she wasnt taking guests due to the Coronavirus situation. There was one guest who said she had nowhere else to go so my mom let her in. She ended up robbing her. She took everything while my parents were sleeping by using a screwdriver to pry open my moms dressing room. All of my moms jewelry, her Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Gucci bags and clothes are gone. All of her savings and money she put aside for her mother in laws funeral were stolen as well. Police will not come and asked us to come in and file a report. Still waiting for Airbnb to get back to us. The thief is the shortest girl on the right. She goes by the name Breanna. She left behind three used cups and a hat.

Edit: My mom noticed her cats acting strangely. Almost lethargic. Cops suspect she drugged them in order to stop them from making noise. My moms cats purr a lot and make noise if they see someone walking around in the middle of the night.

She has one positive review from an Airbnb host from Eastvale CA named Janet.

[Lizzie]

Hello @Lydia378,

I'm so sorry to hear about this awful incident, I do hope that your mum is ok. Just to check have you now spoken with our Support Team? 

Hope to speak with you soon.

Lizzie

Just to add here, if you are trying to reach our Support Team for a non-COVID related/urgent matter please take a look at this post (also by Aisling) which provides more information on alternative ways to reach the team. 

[Wanda166]

I will not refund any guest before I have money in my acct from them I refunded a guest and now ABNB is taking the money I refunded her out of my next reservation money .I received no prior money from that guest and according to future pay outs, I’ll get 00$ So guess I’m out that money Same guests says she only got a 9$ credit besides money I refunded Why is this happening ?

[Brenda878]

My party falls into the new range for a 100% refund, but when we cancelled and requested 100% money back, the host denied it. This home is in Florida where the beaches, restaurants, and bars are closed and there is now a stay at home order. What do we do now? We planned to rebook at the same home in the future, but now we will be selecting a different home, and perhaps a different organization (other than Airbnb) because this whole experience has been a huge pain in the A$$ for everyone involved!

[Julien616]

As a non-host and a user of the service, I’ll make an unpopular point that if the service I pay for cannot be used due to COVID 19 travel bans, I will fight to get my money back.

Someone here made a point that “we should all share the load” of this hard circumstance - what a load of rubbish. Customers should not have to pay for something that they cannot use, regardless of the pre-paid business model.
Look at it this way, if you owned a fruit shop and  couldn’t get there, I’m not getting the fruit, even if I paid in advance. Yes, we may have agreed that I would buy fruit, but if I can’t get there to collect, then what’s the moral thing to do there?

Is it that the fruit shop keeps the money AND the fruit?

[Sarah977]

@Julien616 Well, what if the fruit shop owner said, "Gee Julien, I set that fruit order aside for you, and now I'm closed until Monday, so that fruit that I set aside for you that I couldn't sell to someone else is now going to go bad and will have to be thrown away. So I can't give you back your money, but I will give you a credit for the next time you can come." Would you fight to get your money back, or would you think that sounded fair?

Also, one thing that guests don't realize is that hosts spend time on your reservation whether you show up or not- not a lot, but some. Hosts are busy repairing and upgrading things, scheduling cleaners, stocking up on the supplies they provide for their guests. That's all part of what the guest payments support. I spend about an hour messaging back and forth with my guests about questions they might have, suggestions for what they might want to bring that I don't provide, giving them info on car rental places, or bus schedules, etc, long before their check-in day. Do you think I should just do that for free? Don't you think the host should get something?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a host who thought refunding my guests for this COVID crisis was the right thing to do. But I also know that guests don't seem to consider all the work hosts do to make sure you have a nice place to stay, and all the info you need. before you ever get there.

[Julien616]

@Sarah977  

  I would think that is fair if the rooms went stale (like fruit) - but they don’t.
Id understand if there was special requests that were customized for that particular booking that could not be resold. But apart from the clear desperation to keep customers money without the customer being able to enjoy what they are paying for, then it truly does appear as a cash-grab.

AirBnB should have a more Robust solution for this so that the hosts and guests are covered. But they don’t, and this leaves us arguing for customer’s money. 

[Bobbi27]

Fantastic Response from Airbnb. I think that in the Long Run, this catastrophe will strengthen the entire Airbnb community. Good  Job! 🙂 

[Aisling]

Thank you @Bobbi27 for your nice comment here, we really appreciate this. Stay safe.

[Marina1320]

Hello Aisling,

I understand that your team is busier than ever. However, I have an issue with one of the Airbnb community support representative. She ignores my emails. She replies with the same email. I am dissatisfied with her decision, as it looks like she has a formed opinion and does not want to assess the situation. I requested to contact a supervisor. She replies that she is the final decision. 

How can I reach to a supervisor/manager to explain my side of the story?

thanks.

[Aude1192]

I am experiencing the same thing with a community support representative! It's in another country though. It's is sobering to see that I'm not the only one.

[Lizzie]

Hello @Aude1192 and @Marina1320,

Good to meet you, my name is Lizzie and I am a Community Manager here. 

I'm sorry to hear your recent experience with contact Support wasn't what you expected. I just wanted to check if you managed to get this resolved in the end? 

Was you question regarding to COVID?