Have any Superhosts received an invite to apply for the $5,000 grant scheme?

[Robin4]

It seems each time the CEO has a video session he has some grand offers he is so exited to share with his partners.

I believe some hosts who are active here on the CC have received the promised compensation for reservation cancellations from a $250 M  compensation fund.

I can understand that the $25-$50 offered here or there would not be too onerous for the company to honour baring in mind the claimable window was set to very narrow parameters.

What I would be interested to find out, has any Superhost received an invitation to apply for the (up to $5,000) compensation grant that the CEO went to great pains to promote back at the start of April. 

There is a certain psychology behinds words and statements and the way they are formed!

I smelled a rat when I read the first line of the eligibility criteria........

"There are hundreds of thousands of Superhosts around the world"........really!! All reliable estimates suggest their are between 650,000 and 700,000 Airbnb hosts around the world of which 10-15% are Superhosts.

Obviously an opening statement like that is designed to prime Superhosts up not to be too disappointed if that invite doesn't come.....there after all 'hundreds of thousands' of Superhosts in the mix here.

There may have been a dollar or two on offer here robbed from the employees incentive scheme but it would be really interesting to hear if any one of Superhosts who are active here on the CC have received that illusive invite! 

I am active on a couple of other sites so I will keep hosts here posted if I should actually come across anyone who has received one of these mysterious invites!

Cheers......Rob

[Anonymous]

@Stephanie   Would you happen to have any additional info that would shed some light on this part:  

" financial need (looking at their earnings decline from this year to last)"

How would this work as a measurement of need?  Let's say you're comparing hosts whose income for the past month was zero. The ones with the highest earnings decline are going to be the top-dollar earners from last year - which generally means the hosts with the most expensive listings. In most cases, those will be the ones with the highest property values - and therefore the most financial leverage, which tends to be the opposite of financial  need. How is Airbnb accounting for this disparity? 

[Sarah977]

@Stephanie  I have the same question as Andrew- it seems that Airbnb is equating "need" with the difference in how much a host earned from bookings for the same time period last year compared to this year.  This information in no way whatsoever establishes need, it's a false equivalency. Maybe Host A lost $8000 in bookings for March, compared to last year, and Host B lost $4000. But Host A's house is fully paid off- they have no mortgage payments, and they also have a well-paying part time job. So Host A qualifies for a grant, because they lost more money, while Host B doesn't, even though they are actually financially more in need?

[Anonymous]

@Sarah977  Host C had several years of stable earnings and Superhost status, but their income was severely decimated in 2019 by a natural disaster with prolonged impact on tourism . Their year-to-year differential in 2019/2020 doesn't look significant until you zoom out to previous years. How does that factor in?

[Susan17]

@Anonymous @Sarah977

The host I referred to earlier, long-term Superhost, grossing around $80K a year, did lose about 90% of her bookings for March, April, May. But then again. so did the majority of hosts.

She's definitely been a bit of an evangelist over the years (by her own admission), and spent quite a lot of time spreading the Airbnb gospel and fighting their corner in relation to local regulatory battles. Perhaps that helped her case too, but who knows, really? In the absence of openness and transparency, we can only speculate. 

[Sarah977]

@Anonymous  It was obvious from the get-go that the grants couldn't possibly be based upon need, so once again Airbnb spins and obfuscates, and outright lies. It would be impossible to establish need without hosts submitting tax returns, expense sheets, like you say- documentation of natural disasters which meant they had significant repairs to cover and had to close down their listing last year for awhile, even things like the host or their immediate family needing some kind of non-elective medical procedures. And much of that documentation would be considered private- the sort of info Airbnb would have no business or right to ask for. And even if hosts did submit all that, it would take an office full of accountants working around the clock to pore over the data and determine need. 

And if Host A and Host B both lost an equal amount of money over cancelled bookings, but Host A is a single person, and Host B is a single parent with 3 dependents, are they both going to be eligible for the same amount of grant based on Airbnb's definition of "need"?

[Stephanie]

Hiya @Anonymous and @Sarah977 ,

Thanks for your additional questions  regarding criteria for "most in need." Here is the information I have to share on that:

How are you deciding what hosts have been hit the hardest?

We know that this type of information is complex and sensitive—that’s why we’ve put together specific criteria to make it more objective. We start by looking at hosts’ earning trends to invite those whose earnings have decreased the most when compared to last year. Then we use hosts’ responses in their applications to better understand how that decrease has affected their ability to make ends meet.

Do let me know if you have additional questions or require more clarity on what I've shared - we really want to ensure you're getting the information you need so please feel free to share your thoughts.

Thanks,

Stephanie

PS @Ute42 - thank you for sharing that, it's wonderful to see!

[Sarah977]

@Stephanie  But if the hosts chosen to even receive an application in the first place is based upon the difference in their earnings between last year and this year, then a huge amount of hosts who are actually more in need than those who show larger financial losses won't even be given the opportunity to outline their need for some grant money.

It seems that the most obvious holes in Airbnb's procedures, which almost all hosts can easily see, are somehow not capable of being understood by Airbnb. Or they just think we're all stupid.

[Anonymous]

@Stephanie  Thank you for responding. This at least stands to confirm that the initial selection process is only taking into account 2019 earnings rather than long-term trends. This is useful information for hosts who were just recovering from devastating life events or natural disasters that decimated their 2019 earnings compared to previous years, and encouraging news for the high-earning hosts who had a spectacularly profitable 2019 but maybe weren't so good at saving. It's still not clear to me how the model won't automatically favor the rich hosts (sorta like a Republican tax cut), but I recognize that Airbnb is not about to share its formula.

This is where a little more clarity would be good for the discussion:

Then we use hosts’ responses in their applications to better understand how that decrease has affected their ability to make ends meet.

Does this mean that thousands and thousands of applications are being individually reviewed based 100% upon self-reporting in a writing sample, something like a college-admissions essay?  Or will the next phase involve submitting documentation (aka objective data)? 

Another thing: does Airbnb assume ownership of the content in hosts' application essays? 

[Susan17]

@Stephanie

"We start by looking at hosts’ earning trends to invite those whose earnings have decreased the most when compared to last year"

Decreased over what period of time? March? April? May? Mar-April? Mar-May? Mar-June? All of 2020? It's still all very vague.. 

Say for instance, we just take Mar - May. The majority of hosts, in the majority of markets worldwide will have probably suffered at least an 80% decrease in earnings from last year.

So if a host in an upscale market earned $100K in X period last year, and $20K in the same period this year ($80K decrease in earnings) and a host in a more humble market earned $10K in X period last year, and just $2K in the same period this year ($8K decrease in earnings), does that the automatically make the upscale market host ten times more likely to be selected to receive the initial invite in the first place, than the host in the humble market?

[Anonymous]

@Stephanie  I'm sorry to drag you into this - you're doing the best you can with the very limited scope of what you're permitted to say, and I know how severely censored everyone with an Official account is here. But when we're asked if we have any more questions or require more clarity, it would be nice if there was someone out there who took that literally. Perhaps you could give them a little nudge.

[Lucrecia2]

Please can you take my property in consideration, I am a woman alone, without parents, children. No title, no business, divorced, this has impacted me on all my income. To add to it , I invested my profits Oct 2019 on the property (check the pictures) , so I do not have any savings, please  check my property

[Sarah977]

@Lucrecia2  This is just a discussion forum for hosts and guests. No one here is in charge of who gets sent a grant application. And you can't ask for one- you just have to wait to see if you get one. And there are thousands of hosts in the same financially devastated position as you are. Good luck. I hope you get some $.

[Freda34]

same

[Sarah977]

@Stephanie  Airbnb has a severe allergy to transparency. Every single initiative and subsequent explanation or "clarification" raises more questions than it answers and is always full of holes. 

If Airbnb doesn't do this on purpose, which there is every reason to believe that they do, as it is so consistent, the only other explanation is that whoever is tasked with writing these missives is hugely lacking in clear communication and writing skills. (I don't mean you personally- I know you are just passing on what has been shared with you by Airbnb.)

[Susan17]

@Sarah977

.. or whoever is tasked with writing these missives is an evil genius.

I'd dearly love to meet them, whoever they are. Now that's a conversation I'd give my right arm to have.