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]

@Alice996  Every post of yours here dribbles out more information that you never stated to begin with and the circumstances surrounding this stay you are so upset about really aren't that clear. You say you were forced to early check-out- does that mean the host told you to leave days before your booking was over, or just asked you to leave a half-hour earlier than check-out time? 

If the host told you to leave before the days you had paid for, then certainly you are due a refund for days you weren't allowed to stay. If you simply think you are due a refund because you didn't like the host's attitude, regardless of whether that attitude was against you for your religion, or anything else, that's not grounds for a refund, it's simply something to report as discrimination.

I don't understand how religion even became a topic between you and your host- did she see you performing your religious practices, or were you trying to talk to her about your religious beliefs? (I'm just guessing here, because you've made accusations, but haven't backed them up with any explanation of exactly what happened) If the latter, I can see why the host would want you to leave. 

[Sarah977]

@Alice996  I just now read the review in question, both hers and yours. If the host did indeed make the remarks you said she did, that is certainly disgusting. But you reported her and called her behavior out in the review, to warn other guests, which are exactly the correct things to do. 

However, expecting a refund is not the correct thing to do. I'm very sorry you encountered this sort of discrimination, but hosts, like guests, are just people, and once in awhile you run across a bad egg. 

You have a ton of great reviews, and I wouldn't waste any more time on this if I were you. You've done all you could. A refund doesn't erase or compensate for discriminatory behavior. Refunds are meant for things like arriving to find the place was inaccurately described, hasn't been cleaned, the appliances aren't working, etc. And if you find yourself in a situation like that, or where you are being disrespected, the thing to do is to contact Airbnb, explain what you are being subjected to, or what the issues are and ask them to find you alternative accommodation, ASAP. Then you would get a refund for the days you didn't stay, but paid for, or your payment would be applied to another listing. Continuing to stay somewhere when the conditions are unacceptable, implies that it wasn't really all that bad.

[Alice996]

Well I'm writing a book about all the BS I've experienced as a good and decent person in my own country the past 4 - 5 years.

Any weirdness gets honorable mention.

[Alice996]

I'm a good person and  a good guest, always. 

Nothing more needs to be said.

I don't have to explain myself to any of you.

This made me literally sick.  If that's ok for you - you are not ok with me

[Alice996]

None of this is ok

[Alice996]

I just tried to tell you the bullying I've been enduring on a daily basis in Colorado.   But I was cut off from doing it.

I'm being hurt daily by the very thing I've reported here!  

What that host did was not isolated

I tried to tell you how badly my job did me and how somebody came on social media to tell me to go shoot myself! 

This is what I've been enduring.  Its wrong!

[Alice996]

The host was one of many nasty people I'm taking abuse from every day in Colorado. 

This is not funny.  I needed to be heard.  

[Helen350]

Truly sorry @Alice996 .

Now I understand this wasn't the first time, you've experienced hostility, I see things differently. I think  I CAN understand from some of the experiences I've sufferred.

Sorry if you thought I was dismissing it all... I thought it was a 'one off', if it happens a lot, I can understand it all ads up.

Please accept my apologies, I WAS trying to help, but I got it wrong cos I did not have the back story.. Sorry again, & I hope life gets better for you soon. And I hope you meet nice people where you live, & in your next Airbnb. 

[Alice996]

Thank you Helen its ok.

I had a divorce in 2012 and I was about 50 years old.  I did pretty well in Colorado for the first few years, but my ex kept bothering me and trying to follow (stalk) me and I wanted no part of it.

So I moved and as I did, people would just assume the worst and treat me accordingly.

Finally in the State of Montana (where I moved to for peace), they cut my teaching job, and now it's been hard to get my life back (or just get a better one).

Some places have really discriminated against me too, especially in housing.

One thing I'm doing with Airbnb is moving around and trying to find a decent place to live 

I don't think anything is wrong with it.  I really am a good guest.

But I did get a bad egg on top of so much recent trouble.

[Alice996]

I'm done.  Any more comments,  I am busy and have better things to do.

[Helen350]

Sorry you feel like this @Alice996 .

I really WAS trying to be supportive, by trying to sound sympathetic & understanding. I think @Sarah977 was too, & I thought her last answer was good & helpful. 

I tried to help by saying what I would do in your situation. 

Your host was WRONG to say what she said about your religion. But refunds are for sub-standard FACILITIES, not nasty hosts, as far as I understand.

Yesterday I tried to explain how Airbnb works. There is no "money-back-if-not-completely-satisfied, like you get with other products. 

Whats done is done. We can't change the past. It's how we deal with it that matters. Try to be positive, forget it, put it behind you, move on. Make a positive effort not to be angry & bitter, it will only make you more upset. 

The only constructive help I can now give, is perhaps to seek out a counselor, if your distress does not ease itself in time?

- Wishing you better experiences with future bookings ! 

[Alice996]

It's not the money.  

She slandered my character and its untrue and there it sits for the whole world to see and judge me wrongly.

That is what is not ok.

I just wanted the money back as compensation for her slander.

[Helen350]

I don't think they give money back for slander, just for dirty rooms or non-existent facilities, but I may be wrong @Alice996 

[Alice996]

Honestly I don't see why not.  If I get an attorney to take my case that's what he will want

[Alice996]

 I cannot find a way to delete comments.   Sorry about that