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

[Marina1320]

Hi Lizzie,

My situation was not about COVID. And no, it was not resolved.

The support contact did not resolve my situation, did not want to forward my situation to a supervisor, and advised me that she was the last resort and would stop communicating with me.

Is there any way that I could describe my situation in private  - email or phone?

Thanks,

Marina.

[Sarah977]

@Marina1320  If you want @Lizzie  to see your post, you have to actually tag her, like I just did with you and her, otherwise she won't get a notification that you have addressed her. 

To tag someone, type in the @ symbol, then choose their name from the drop-down box that appears.

[Albert1743]

I  am the guest and cancelled the booking in late Mar and the check in date is 26Apr.

Although various Case Managers and her supervisors confirmed that my case met all the criteria stated in articles 2701 and 1320, they refused the refund of my deposit at the cost of USD2,000. They said my cancellation was done earlier than their update on 30Mar for the coverage upto 31May. 

Given my flights were all cancelled in mid Mar until end May, I definitely have no way going to the destination.  I doubt is there any differences in making the cancellation before or after 30Mar as the fact is that it is a no go situation, not to mention the country announced banning visitors visiting their country.

I wrote to the Customer support team everyday for 2 weeks and ask for their explanations. But they always replied in a standard format and avoided to answer my questions directly.

I sent email to Aisling over a week to tell her the case, no reply was yet received so far.

What kind of customer service is provided by Airbnb?  Horrible! 

[Harold122]

Hello: @Aisling 

I recently had a terrible experience where a host accepted my booking, and charged me, only to fraudulently offer a cheaper booking at the last minute, without price adjustment.  Advertising one room, only to pressure the potential guest into accepting another after payment is the type of “bait and switch” I know Airbnb is vehemently against.

The host and I both agreed that a refund was best, only for the host to change his mind at the last minute (again), revoke the refund, and offer yet another subpar, hastily prepared option that had not even been given a proper maid servicing.

Any help you can give regarding the cessation of the aforementioned host’s fraudulent practices and the simple #refund I am owed due to his dishonesty on your platform would be greatly appreciated. I’ve talked to a few friends in the press in both my hometown of London and Los Angeles that travel often and also use AirBnB, and they are quite interested in the outcome of this case. Cleanliness is a very relevant topic right now because of COVID-19, and so is the expectation that a business like Airbnb would give credence to such a concern in this current climate of pandemic disease.

I look forward to a positive resolution to this matter.

**** [Personal information hidden for safety reasons – inline with the Community Center Guidelines]

[Sarah977]

@Harold122   "The host and I both agreed that a refund was best, only for the host to change his mind at the last minute (again), revoke the refund, and offer yet another subpar, hastily prepared option that had not even been given a proper maid servicing."

What you, as a guest, are supposed to do if you arrive to find the place not as advertised, dirty, or the host tries to pressure you into bait and switch, is for you to right away contact Airbnb, explain the situation, and cancel. They will often try to find you another place instead, or give you a full refund with 10% extra to cover the inconvenience, or extra cost of a different listing. If you do this, the hosts can't "revoke the refund"- it's handled between the guest and Airbnb and they make the determination about your refund, not the host.

[Harold122]

@Sarah977 thank you very much for that detailed response!! I truly appreciate it. I am definitely the more wiser for future bookings, should there be any 😊 

[Stan-And-Juris0]

Anyone from Airbnb, please reply to our messages.  Our guest from March-June has been charged for this month, April but we haven't received payout. Now she has decided to cancel the rest of her stays.  

Another guest, decided to cancel his one-month stay from March 16 .  A case manager initially e-mailed us if we are agreeable to give a full refund.  We reached out to our guest (who was a regular) and clarified that he was only asking for 50% refund, so we both agree to that.  We however do not know how this is going to be processed because we do not have notifications or charges from our bank.  

We've called and e-mailed but no reply, please help.

Stan and Juris

[Stan-And-Juris0]

@Aisling 

Anyone from Airbnb, please reply to our messages.  Our guest from March-June has been charged for this month, April but we haven't received payout. Now she has decided to cancel the rest of her stays.  

Another guest, decided to cancel his one-month stay from March 16 .  A case manager initially e-mailed us if we are agreeable to give a full refund.  We reached out to our guest (who was a regular) and clarified that he was only asking for 50% refund, so we both agree to that.  We however do not know how this is going to be processed because we do not have notifications or charges from our bank.  

We've called and e-mailed but no reply, please help.

[Lizzie]

Hello @Stan-And-Juris0,

Thanks for your message here. It does sound a little complicated. I've sent you message over to a colleague of mine in our Support Team, to check on the message and to see if I can get any update for you. 

Let me know if this has already been sorted. I hope all is well.

Thanks,
Lizzie

[Stan-And-Juris0]

Thanks Lizzie, 

After my post for help, a certain Jerry from Airbnb support replied.  This is how we understood his reply to be.   For  Guest A's case (March-June), we still haven't gotten the payout for April.  We understood Jerry to say that the refund for Guest B will be deducted from the future payout of the host.  So we are thinking that our payout for Aprill  from Guest A will be applied  to guest B's refund and thereafter until it's satisfied .  It is just frustrating that Guest B was refunded 100% when in fact, he was only asking for a 50% refund.  Please let us know if we understood it right.  

Again thank you for your time and to all of you working inspite of the situation, you all are highly appreciated.  

[Sheela13]

Aisling can you please help me to apply for the superhost relief fund

[Sarah977]

@Sheela13  You can't apply. Airbnb will somehow determine which hosts need the grant the most and "invite" you to apply. And that apparently won't happen until mid-May. Don't hold your breath and don't count on receiving anything. You may be one of the chosen ones or not.

[Lizzie]

Hello @Sheela13,

Just to update you on on Superhost relief fund. All invites to eligible Superhosts are starting to go out and all of them will be sent out by May 15th. To find out more about eligibility take a look here: Answers to your questions on the Superhost Host Relief Fund?

I hope this helps.

Lizzie

(FYI and thanks - @Sarah977  )

[Aude1192]

Hi @Aisling thank you for your work during such a difficult time. I have a massive issue pertaining to COVID19 and Airbnb. I have been in contact with the support system for about three weeks now but no one has been able to help. I cancelled my reservation and after spending one night there and living with a sick host. I got COVID19 subsequently. According to the terms and conditions, I am entitled to a refund. Yet, I am unable to get one, which is surprising.  Would you be able to help? Thank you. 

[Alex6599]

Hello, Questioning how we are supposed to file unemployment/ procedure