I want to make everyone aware of a new AI component to making reservations that impacts hosting. Wed of this week I received an inquiry to book my whole house listing for Friday and Saturday with 2 adults and 2 children from an out of town profile with 3 5 star reviews. We negotiated a special rate. On thursday the guest attempted to accept the offer and book the house. They received this message:
"Airbnb prevents reservations for entire home when a pattern of factors (like location and reservation time) suggests the booking may be unsafe, please try a hotel or a private room".
Both of us reached out to customer care and were told this is a new safety feature to root out the house parties problem...which by the way I agree with as I had to kick some kids out of my house on new years eve as they were getting high and staging for a rave....but none-the-less.....we both called customer care and were told their hands were tied. They could not override the decision of the system.
At this time, I am re-evaluating my sole connection to ABNB. If they would employ some simple ID Confirmation technology into their systems they could root out fraud. If they would allow overrides by either hosts or customer care after review I would imagine this would work better.
Especially with the Covid 19 costing my business about a 40% of my annual income due to wedding season and my town hosting the College world series and swim trials....all cancelled.....I had 10K in reservations already and still had the CWS reservations to go.
I need every dollar and this lock out created a lot of problems.
Just wanted to make everyone aware of this as it seems ABNB failed to properly inform us of these "enhancements".
Alan
