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

[Tia7013]

Hi Plushy. I am sympathetic to how your company has been affected by the COVID-19 situation (I really am, I understand that it has made things difficult for both sides), but you are complaining about not receiving funds and yet, you're taking full advantage of your customers. 

We booked with you for a stay in March and you were extremely difficult to communicate with, which made our experience terrible. My boyfriend and I were planning to stay at a Plushy Host-managed property in Kauai from March 19-March 28. However, we were unable to, due to COVID-19 travel restrictions and safety concerns. We are grad students in Seattle and were advised by both our school and governor not to travel. Even Hawaii’s Governor urged all tourists to cancel all non-essential travel. We reached out to both VRBO and Plushy Host multiple times weeks before our scheduled travel date to notify them of our mandatory shelter-at-home policy. We continued to call through the dates of our scheduled trips. While VRBO was somewhat helpful, Plushy Host flat out refused to give us ANY refund, or even offer travel credits. Even though we were told by one representative (Quinn?) that Plushy would provide a refund as long as it was approved by VRBO, later representatives (i.e. Mary) told us inconsistently that no refund at all would be given. The reason provided was that Plushy’s cancellation policy was strict, and did not allow for refunds. However, when we asked on multiple occasions to see the policy, we were only ever sent HomeAway’s policy (which encourages refunds in the spirit of hospitality) and we still have never once been able to read Plushy’s cancellation policy. It is not posted online and we have never received an email with it. It is inconceivable that a company would enforce a cancellation policy without ever even allowing their customers to read/review it. We asked three times to speak with a manager to explain our situation and were either told that there was no manager on site, or that they would have the manager call us back within 24 hours. We never received any calls from any managers. We were even told by two separate VRBO representatives that they would personally reach out to Plushy themselves to tell them to process the refunds, but to no avail. We were ultimately charged the FULL AMOUNT for all 9 nights, INCLUDING cleaning and service fees. Although we understand COVID-19 is creating difficult conditions for businesses, we feel that Plushy's lack of any type of flexibility essentially amounted to both: (1) encouraging travel against government advisories, and (2) seeking to profit off of a global pandemic. We are both very reasonable people and can be sympathetic to businesses during this time. But as customers, we also ask for some flexibility in light of the circumstances, just as the majority of other corporations/companies have done in light of the pandemic. At the very least, we would have expected to receive consistent answers and to be treated with respect, but Plushy told us they would provide us with a refund, only to deny it later. We were also hung up on multiple times and never received return calls when we were promised them. As students, this was a huge chunk of money for us. We felt that we were doing the right thing by canceling our trip, but we were met with zero flexibility by the host. Overall, the lack of concrete answers, responsiveness, and any sense of understanding by the host has made this a very stressful and terrible experience for us.

[Sarah977]

@Tia7013  Sorry you had such a bad experience with this company. In the future, you might want to look for places to book that are managed hands-on by the owner/host, rather than big property management companies. I've read several guest stories about having all sorts of issues with these big management firms. 

[Jane2824]

Please could someone advise. I have bookings starting mid May.  Should I cancel them due to vivid-19?

[Jane2824]

Covid-19

[Karen2540]

Yes cancel

[John4704]

Airbnb email on travel restrictions .  Why would anyone in their right mind check with/follow information from the World Health Organization.?  Tedros is a documented liar and a puppet for disinformation for China. This is the most corrupt organization in the world that has literally  killed thousands around the world by failing to sound the warning of CV19 when they knew it in Dec. 2019.  Tedros finally admitted it was a problem after the world had been infected (Jan. 20, 2020) . I am offended Airbnb advocates listening to anything the WHO says.

[Macrina0]

Just on a factual level this is a simplification of a more complex series of events. The first report to the WHO local office was on the 31 st of December 2019 of a new pneumonia like disease while the virus was not identified as a new strain until the 7 th of January. The first identified death had been on the 4 th of January. The WHO issued the first guidance to all countries on the 10th of January i.e. it shared what it knew with all governments 10 days after it had been informed and only three days after the virus had been identified as a new strain.
There are 194 member states of the WHO and each country has a representative who elect a board of 35 health specialists who then elect the Director General. The WHO is far from perfect and it's need to balance China and other members interests means it does not always get things right - it's stance in relation to Taiwan is a good example- but demonizing an organisation that is involved in important work at a time when multilateral cooperation is of extreme importance is not really healthy.

[Jon2699]

upload site for documentation for refund due to corona virus not working!! advice? 

[Donna953]

Stay at home folks!

[Deborah953]

I am sorry for hosts who lose money due to this, but I'm a guest that forfeited 1/2 my stay because the host wouldn't refund due to" his policy." I had to cancel or else I would have lost my airfare to the location -New Orleans and my Jazz festival tickets as well! Eric, host of Marigny Condo, had no right to take my money for which I had no option. AirBNB which was offering full refunds if you cancelled by May 31, supported the host and didn't even abide by their own terms.. I will NEVER stay at another AirBNB property again!

[Vassilis-and-Revekka0]

The coronavirus outbreak clearly represents a challenge for the hospitality industry and unfortunately it has a significant impact on global travel behaviour. We have seen a reduction in bookings and an increase in cancellations which we are monitoring closely. As you are all experiencing, the situation is changing daily, therefore it is impossible to predict the impact on travel demand into the upcoming summer months and beyond. Although these are difficult times for everyone, the sun will come out again. When it does, we will be here to offer a well-deserved travel experience to our holidaymakers they can trust, once again.

Until then, turn off your TV, avoid the pathetic media coverage of this major health issue, sit back, relax and enjoy www.greecefromhome.com

[Helen427]

@Vassilis-and-Revekka0

Excellent words of wisdom!!

Not long now until those lovely sunny days in the Greek Islands..lovely spot to be at any time of the year.

Enjoy the quiet whilst you can.

All the best

Central To All Home & Location

Remuera, Auckland, New Zealand 

[Stan-And-Juris0]

Please direct us to when we can get compensated for one guest already checked out, another one checking out tomorrow.  We are concerned for the guest checking in tomorrow if we will ever get paid too.  Once and for all please reply to our concern.

We are so confused at what is going around the community, shall we stay or get out of ABB?  Please pay us, we've not gotten anything from ABB with the help promised, we can wait, but we need to be compensated for what we worked for....please, this is our money....don't take it all, it's for the mortgage and food.  We are just one of those using our extra space to make ends meet for two seniors.  We haven't even gotten any stimulus from the government either.   Airbnb is okay to send us guests, but where's the money?

[Alf-And-Hester0]

We have also not received our payouts for our last 4 bookings from March till now. The guests stayed and paid in full. But no payment for us from AirBNB.

[Alf-And-Hester0]

I have sent 19 messages and called 8 times about our 4 missing payouts for the month of April. I have not been given an answer or explanation or any indication of when we will get paid. Our March, April bookings are not showing up in our transaction history or upcoming payments. For every query I’ve sent, I get the same reply... “ we will investigate” we’ve been waiting for our payouts for almost a month. We have never had such bad service from AirBNB and for AirBNB to withhold our payments during such difficult times with no reason or explanation is shocking. We’ve spoken to the guests in question, they paid for their bookings in full and were happy with their stays, and sent great reviews, but no payments from AirBNB and no answers either.