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

[Jane2797]

@Aisling It is truly a very devastating situation for everyone, guests and hosts. We had a long term rental reservation from a host in New York City from Jan to May as we are a group of performers working in a Broadway show by contract. Needless to say, Broadway went dark two weeks ago and we were all sent home (we all live out of New York and we booked the airbnb rental in NYC for the job) and lost our jobs. We have vacated the airbnb listing but we were not able to get the refund because the airbnb Covid-19 extenuating circumstance policy doesn't not cover a reservation that  has already begun (the check-in has passed). As of today, New York has more than 60,000 cases of coronavirus infections and more than 1,000 death and there is an imminent threat to our safety to stay in the city, especially as a non-resident. The New York Governor has mandated a stay home law and as non-residents of the New York State we had to go to our respective homes and stay there. It is  fundamentally wrong and simply not fair for the guests to continue to pay for airbnb rental costs every month when this deadly disease is rampaging the city. Airbnb needs to modify the Covid-19 extenuating circumstance to cover these long term reservations as there is a huge inconsistency in the policy that needs to be corrected. The policy states that "we are now offering Guests full refunds and Hosts no charge cancellations for reservations booked on or before March 14th with a check in date of April 14th or earlier" so our reservation (booked in Sep 2019 and checked in date Jan 2020) should by every definition qualify for the full refund but yet it was not refunded because there was a hidden line about already checked in reservations. 

[Roderick8]

Please send me a wire for 5000€ to cover my immediate losses. I am so sick and tired of the phony "we care about you and our AirBnB Community blah blah ... ". The fact bulk of your revenues come from SMEs like myself that are leasing several properties and we got collectively  thrown under the bus by AirBnB.

[Janelle87]

Hi! 
I just read today by your Airbnb CEO that there will be a host relief fund for the cancellations caused by the COVID-19. 

I was significantly affected and although I had the strict policy, we didn’t receive any fees. Being this my only source of income and we don’t have new requests until further notice, I would like more information about this fund. 

Can you let us know where and how to apply it? 

Thanks. 

[Huma0]

@Janelle87 

Apparently, you can't apply for it. It's by 'invitation only', i.e. Airbnb will decide who are the hosts most in need. How they can do that without having our financial accounts baffles me, but then I shouldn't be surprised anymore about anything Airbnb does.

[Janelle87]

That’s ridiculous and unacceptable! How in the world they would know about who needs and who doesn’t when they have a #terrible platform. I have communicated many times that their platform is deficient and lacks functionality. They confirmed that their platform is way out of being perfect, and it needs work. But, how is this a solution? How can we accept this excuse when we are talking about a billion-dollar company that its sole business is online?

Unfortunately, I don’t trust them deciding, or making the outreach to their hosts. We are the ones that know our situation, and the only ones able to make the claims. 

I have two properties in two different locations (countries), and I lost 100% of my income. Ahh, and the little fee I was able to charged to one guest (which they agreed), now @Airbnb unilaterally determined that they will deduct this amount on my next payout.
Do you know what this means?

Not only this will take a long time to recuperate, but they are not thinking on the consequences. There are millions of people who are unemployment, do you think when this goes away people will think about vacationing?  Also, for the ones that can, there is a good probability that they’ll ask for discounts. Maybe some people out of desperation may agree, but either way it will impact our pockets. 

Sometimes I think if we should rent our places on our own. I use other platforms and they have better Customer service and solutions that makes us feel safe and protracted. This is worth it! 

As hosts, we have to demand that aribnb do their job well and give us solutions that will help us. Now is a great the time to demonstrate that they wouldn’t abandon us during these tuff times and show us that they are a serious and responsible company.

[Lizzie]

Hello @Janelle87, 

Lovely to meet you. Since you last posted we've received an update on the timeline for the $250M program. 

Pay outs to eligible hosts begin on Thursday April 16th and we will be continuing to make these disbursements throughout next week, reaching hundreds of thousands of hosts around the world. If you are eligible but have not yet received a notification from Airbnb, you are likely scheduled for the coming days.

Just to add, there is no need to contact Community Support to check up on the status of processing. If you are eligible, you should receive a notification soon. 

I hope this helps to provide a little more information.

Thanks,

Lizzie

(FYI - @Huma0)

[Huma0]

Thanks @Lizzie for the update, but I think you are referring to the $250 million programme for 25% payments of cancellation fees rather than the Superhost fund? I read that anyone being invited to apply for the latter would be contacted by 15th April, so I assume that those of us (like me) who have not received any message from Airbnb about this are not invited to apply?

[Lizzie]

Yes I am referring to the $250m program above @Huma0, sorry I thought that was what was being asked about. 

For the Superhost relief fund, yes this is on a slightly different timeline, but emails for this fund started to be sent out from April 10th and continue to be sent out. The latest information can be found in this article, here. Fingers crossed you will receive an email Huma and I'll continue to provide updates as soon as I know. 

Sorry if I caused any confusion there, too many funds! : ) I hope this is helpful @Janelle87.

Thanks to you both.

Lizzie

[John978]

Is Puerto Rico included as part of the United States Airbnb Commitment with regards to the $250 million assistance Airbnb is providing?  Why do I not have to login as a host to post and how do I subscribe for comments via email so that I don't have to figure out how to get back to my post?   Seems very antiquated to be honest....  If Airbnb is emailing our guests, shouldn't we have all been in the loop for that email went out?  This is all very confusing...

[Lizzie]

Hey @John978,

Lovely to meet you. Regarding your question on posting here in the Community Center. The login is need for privacy reasons, but if you are already logged in to your Airbnb account, all you need to do is click on 'sign in' in the top right corner of the Community Center and it should auto sign you in to speed up the process. 

To sign up to follow this topic, if you click on the 'options' button at the top of this post or the little arrow on the first post in this topic, and then press 'subscribe' you will receive email notifications to your personal email inbox. You can manage your subscriptions at a later date if you want to change this. 

If you have any other questions, please let me know and I'll be happy to help.

Thank you,

Lizzie

[John978]

Thank you for the information... very appreciated.

[Trudi15]

AirBNB is planning on going public and will make billions. Many of us survive on monthly hosting fees, in my case we had to close so I am in a zero revenue and zero income situation. The $5K grants will help, but only help 2,000 of us (out of the estimated 400,000). This is a drop in the bucket.  I am over 60 yeas old so am not going to open my home up to guests for the foreseeable future. If we are partners then airbnb should have had insurance to protect us and needs to add it in the future, and should make superhosts shareholders so at least we can make up for our loses in the IPO.

[Sarah977]

@Trudi15   I can assure you their IPO is off the table for the foreseeable future. 

[Peter2636]

I have had two large bookings canceled due to covid 19. Will I receive any money from Airbnb for these bookings? And how / when will I receive it ? Peter 

[Janelle87]

Unfortunately, the cancellation due to the covid-19 situations applied to every level of policy. The host basically had to give away full refund (our your guests would have a terrible impression of the host), and now I find out, that if you charged something (wvwn if they agreed with you), the payout will be charged to the host in the next stays until every penny is returned. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE HOST that hast AIRBNB as they source of income?

Airbnb is giving back 100% refund. If you would charge them, your listing could get affected in the future. 

I tried to accommodate some guests to another date, but they where unable because they were traveling for a specific event. Now that we don’t know what’s happening, I don’t have new requests. 

Airbnb CEO indicated that there was going to be a relief funds to help hosts that had significant losses as part of these cancellations. The link that has the information (see below), it seems that all this is just another marketing campaign for them to look good. 

Based on what the CEO said, many of us would qualify for this support. However, they indicated that they will not support us and not just that, that if I charged anyone with a fee for a cancellation during this time, they will extract that amount from my next reservations. So IMAGINE!  No only I got affected by this without any support from AIRBNB while this crisis is happening, but if I start trying to recuperate in the future, it will get penalize by taking our money for their benefits. And they will be charging a fee too. 

I have thought about this platform many times and it seems that it is very unlikely that the hosts will ever be protected or feel protected by this company. 

It doesn’t even tell you how to apply. 

here is the link:  https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2701/extenuating-circumstances-policy-and-the-coronavirus-covid1...