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

[Jean-Philippe101]

@Lizzie Hello,

we booked before March 14th an apartment in Berlin from May 14th to May 17th (800€).

The German government doesn't allow us to go to Berlin, and the host of the apartment refuse to reimburse the full amount and just propose a voucher for later, but we can't and don't want to travel anymore later to Berlin. 

What's are our options ?

Thanks 

JP

[Eva358]

Airbnb has not NOTHING during this whole Covid lockdown - nothing for the hosts!! Now you're sending me $10 for the month... You know what, if you think that's enough to cover my loss, which is closer to $1300, then keep it!

[Jason1350]

@Aisling  I appreciate you and your teams efforts during this time and truly hope we can all get through this and once again celebrate the values of being part of the AirBnB Community.

Question, I’ve been waiting patiently for an invitation to the relief grant as I imagine many hosts are as well. If we qualify and haven’t been contacted to apply is there anything we can do?

I’m running out of options to keep my listings live and honestly, I’d much rather have someone tell me no than await an invitation that may never arrive. I’ve been hosting since 2013, am a super host and I’ve participated in the first responder program from the day it was introduced, I’ve adjusted my cancellation policy, I’ve reduced my rates significantly and am really getting concerned because I can’t make ends meet. I really don’t want to leave this community but unfortunately don’t qualify for any state or federal assistance at this time and this grant is important to me as it may buy me a little more time while things get back to a new normal.

Thanks for listening! If you have any insight that may be valuable I’d be so grateful! Hope to hear from you!

Thanks, Jason 

[Mia834]

Hello,

I am a host whose property provides her sole income. With the pandemic and the remote blocking of our calendars, I am really struggling financially. The CEO promised financial help in April but I have heard nothing. I have large overheads to pay on my listing and if I do not get help, I worry I might have to remove my listing to rent to a long term tenant instead. Something I have tried before but it has always caused me problems. Has anybody heard anything about the promised assistance? Thank you 

[Michael4898]

I am a super host and need to get the ball rolling on getting refunded for 2 of my guests having to cancel because of the Covid-19/Corona Virus forcing 1 guest to leave a month early and my other guest was unable to travel from Ireland which he would’ve stayed at my place March 30-April 31..

Resulting both of those guests had to cancel because of Covid-19 / Corona Virus.

What do I/we need to do so that I can get refunded for them not being able to stay at my place..???!

[Lilly101]

Hi @Aisling Can you help with the following? I’m a British reporter based in Paris. I pay 100 percent of my rent through AirBNB. I’ve lost 100 percent of that income, 100 percent of my income as a reporter and I’m not eligible for any government support but thanks for the list. I’m not a super host and I don’t have cancellations but lost bookings because my bookings are always last minute. Your customer care wont connect me to your Covid response team to ask for help in compensating some of this estimated 9,000 Euros in lost bookings over the next three months so I can pay my rent in two days. I can’t get a response despite being a reporter from any execs via email or your press office. I appreciate all of your efforts but what about those of us with lost bookings that can’t pay our rent now? Thanks @brianchesky

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Lilly101 Whilst I sympathise with your situation why do you believe Airbnb could or should help you out? 

At the end of the day its a Pandemic that has caused your problem not Airbnb.

[Ian-And-Anne-Marie0]

@Mike-And-Jane0 

@Lilly101 Whilst I sympathise with your situation why do you believe Airbnb could or should help you out? 

At the end of the day its a Pandemic that has caused your problem not Airbnb.

The existence of Covid-19 is one thing, the interruption or interference by Airbnb over the issue by refunding in full the guest rather than considering both guest and host as stated in the terms and conditions is the reason why @Lilly101 and plenty of other hosts feel so betrayed and let down.

The fact remains that given hosts' individual choices and their ability to chose exactly what cancellation policy they have as their insurance against such a 'pandemic' - 'pandemic' not an 'endemic' or 'epidemic'. 'Endemic' was how the EC policy was written at the time of all affected bookings pre-March before the Covid-19EC came in, details were changed - hosts would be quite capable of handling guest cancelations appropriate to their own situations.

Rather than that, an enforced, ill-devised blanket cancellation scheme screwed hosts immeasurably, leaving Airbnb clambering to pacify hosts with an ill-administered, wrongly calculated, (non-administered in many high value cases), limited relief fund. Peanuts of the amounts which hosts could have negotiated with guests for mutual benefit - apart from you @Mike-And-Jane0 as your cancellation policy would just remain you with 'nothing' anyway.

As if that wasn't enough, now, long term hosts providing accommodation as they ever have done using cancellation policies they always have done - to protect their income - are finding Airbnb are notifying guests on booking that 'alternative' accommodation is available with more beneficial cancellation policies for them. So whats that now? Nothing but more punitive actions against hosts to coerce them into some homogenised Airbnb offering.

You might be alright 'Jack' @Mike-And-Jane0  but you're not the only show in town, and Airbnb should have been more balanced and accommodating their treatment of all hosts, including @Lilly101 both in the past, now and in the future.

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Ian-And-Anne-Marie0 

Its currently ILLEGAL to host in the UK and France. In the UK it is also illegal to not refund a guest if they are unable to actually provide the service (ie property) offered.

So I say again - Airbnb have so far done little wrong and people should blame Covid 19 rather than Airbnb. NOW when/if Airbnb allow people to cancel for free even though they can travel and stay in a property I will happily join their critics. 

[Helen427]

@Ian-And-Anne-Marie0 @Mike-And-Jane0 

Are you aware the lawfulness of the lockdown in the UK is been challenged by an airline owner?

Sorry I can't recall his name but good on him. It's worthwhile looking it up and keeping an eye on it in Parliament & Courts of laws if it goes that far.

 It's not illegal to rent out one's property one can do what they want with it.

It's unlawful for Governments to have been mislead or to mislead there people.  

We live in a democratic society & the last time I looked the UK is a Commonwealth Country with the Queen as Head of State...Since when did the UK not have pre existing laws prior to Coronavirus/ Covid19??Directors of Health must abide by common laws..as should Airbnb.

Blanket approaches to Covid 19 are screwing up the peaceful relations we are lawfully entitled to.

[Ian-And-Anne-Marie0]

@Helen427 

The fact that 'things happen' never means thats an end in the matter. Currently things are happening and being recorded to have happened only to be raised again to be conclusively satisfied.

The rights of lockdown, travel restrictions, cancellation policy overriding, changes in policy wording without adequate notice, Bait-and-switch refunds, switching bookings to accommodations offering flexible cancellations, inadequate reporting of EC evidence for financial gain (fraud), applying policies to non-qualifying dates, deliberately prolonging resolutions... all sorts of things will be under acute scrutiny after the fact. This could go on for a very long time.

'Fairly treated' should be the aim. As a marker that's being missed by miles.

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Helen427 

Thanks for the input but it is, per the UK Governments Covid legislation, illegal to rent to holiday makers at present. Just because this is being challenged (and I hadn't heard that) doesn't make it legal.

By the way the Queen doesn't actually have any real power in the UK anymore.

[Helen427]

@Mike-And-Jane0

"Rule of law", it would pay to have a look at UK Government legislation.

We have had our former Attorney General Chris Finlayson here in New Zealand also discuss "Ultra Vires".

It pays to keep a close watch on articles in Law at this time through UK Gazette,  UK Human Rights Watch & European Union Courts of Law & other sources where there's useful legal discussion and recommendations.

All the best

[Ian-And-Anne-Marie0]

@Mike-And-Jane0 

Currently being the operative word. That doesn't and didn't cover past and doesn't cover future. Cancellations specific to area and region are far better evaluated and handled by a local presence and between host/guest than a global dictatorship.

Airbnb have forced poverty on many hosts, despite their planning. If you think thats 'little wrong' you maybe haven't noticed.

[Denice24]

@Mike-And-Jane0 love your responses here. you should come to america you'd have a full time job combating the fake news.  

I live in the US and have a property in Panama. The entire country is shut down, nothing can be done. I'm not gonna sue the Panamanian government for prioritizing human life over my business. 

What stuns me the most here is that people are dying. Literally dying. In my home state of Massachusetts 68,000 ppl are infected. We all know someone who has died, is sick, or who is on the front lines everyday working in hospitals or whatnot to keep us all safe. So yeah, it sucks that airbnb cancelled all my reservations. It sucks that the people where I have my house have no work, their government rations ran out, and I am literally feeding families with the proceeds that I have left in the rental house account rather than dreaming up ways to beautify my property.

But ya know what? I wake up every day thankful that I have my good health. I sleep well at night knowing that have the opportunity to feed others only because I saved some money from the proceeds of the rental property.

As a business owner of my own little rental property business, I take FULL RESPONSIBILITY for the RISK involved in RUNNING MY OWN BUSINESS, including ALL RISKS KNOWN AND UNKNOWN. 

You all are free to disagree with me. Some things I hate about airbnb. It is a choice that I make to use this service. I may make different choices in the future. But it is a choice.

And @Helen427 yeah, go ahead and sue whomever you want to about who has authority to so what in this world. It takes no courage to hire a lawyer. It takes courage to face up and face the failure in ourselves to not have seen the end of the money train. Corona virus or no, the level of disposable cash that fueled this giant orgy of food, travel & luxury was coming to end at some point. Everyone with any common sense know that you're supposed to make hay while the sun shines. Not sue airbnb or the Queen or whomever else you think has wronged you when the sun went down an you got stuck with your pants down.

I will close this missive with a quote from Warren Buffett, "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."