AirBNB website is full of bugs and glitches and it may cost you money in ways of wasted time and even reduced income if you are not extremely careful. For instance:
1. The Instant Booking turns itself on and off sometimes without you knowing it. The support of course blames you, the host and not their website.
2. Currency settings have a glitch or a bug that switches between USD, EUR etc. without you knowing it, so when you send an offer or confirmation of reservation watch what currency it is in, although that may not save your butt, because it may send an offer in undesired currency even if you check it twice.
3. The interface needs a steep learning curve and is quite confusing. They don't have a Site Map, which makes things extremely difficult to navigate.
4. Creating your own AirBNB Symbol feature lets you play with it, without WARNING, but it does not save your work. The support, two different support specialists admitted the feature is incomplete and does not work properly, yet no notice or warning is placed on it to warn you to not waste your time with it.
5. Calendar is several clicks away and until you learn where it is its hard work finding it, and many other features and functions.
6. Smart Pricing sometimes throws prices wildly by as much as 300% difference or turns itself off messing all your pricing up. Be careful with it. It's in Beta stage and you are the test rabbit who tests the feature for AirBNB without getting any rewards from it.
7. Smart Pricing charges around $50 (example only) for the summer (more or less) and then one day, boom its $15 most days, same days that were $50 just a couple days before.
8. When you clear some canceled reservation or change anything beware the site is full of bugs and glitches that can really hurt your pocket. Some days never clear and remain blocked or unavailable unless and until you notice that and fix it manually. AirBNB website is like a toddler, it needs daily and even hourly attention and if you leave it alone for a whle you may return to find a huge mess.
9. Some days that were blocked by me were made available by some bug or glitch on AirBNB website.
10. AirBNB staff says that AirBNB.com is only for USA and using it with a different currency than USD may put host in trouble, (I though .com was International,but it seems USA has usurped it purely for themselves accordingly to AirBNB) yet national websites such as AirBNB.de or AirBNB.fr do not have English language option for expat hosts. Truly a mess.
11. People (potential guests) will make a reservation in order to inquire host about local info only, most likely not planning on being a guest for that particular host. They just need the info, on events, car rentals etc. Which is fine with me. No big deal. You provide the info, others will host them. Glad to help out fellow human.
12. Every time I log in and hover over "MESSAGES" bar at the top I get this:
"Sorry, we can’t load new messages right now. View Inbox"
What's up with that?
13. The cursor just will not show up (in the photo gallery photo text descriptions edit) and I try hard for more than I would like to until I find the cursor (sometimes), magically, somewhere else and then erase everything to rewrite it again and etc.
14. Very often or even most of the time when I email response@airbnb.com I get the "email not received" message. AirBNB support says they don't see a problem and receive "all" of my emails, yet a lot of them never get responded to or addressed.
15. When AirBNB calls a customer, a host, they introduce themselves as "AirBNB". Yet they do not. AirBNB always call me and some guy or girl asks "Hi is this John?". This may seem familiar to them or to most USAmericans, but in Europe we do not use first names and we do not respond phone calls that are so familiar. There is sometimes also an issue of security. How many times AirBNB called me and hung up on me. What's up with that? They need to prop up their professionalism.
16. Trying to poost on here I get this: "Your post has been changed because invalid HTML was found in the message body. The invalid HTML has been removed. Please review the message and submit the message when you are satisfied." - yet nothing has been highlited. What's up with that?
I bet there are more bug, glitches and problems at AirBNB website or I may missed or forgot to describe some of them, but I am sure I got most of them here. I believe those need to be addressed if AirBNB wants to become a professional business. Hope this helps and share yours with others as well.
