Beware.
Once you start with Airbnb, it is hard to leave. If you have a high rating, it will cost a lot to establish with a different platform and rebuild. So, my advice: don't do it. Don't start with Airbnb.
In general, as you will see if you cruise the community forum, Airbnb is not host oriented. They don't have your back. And in some ways their system is beyond parasitic and into abusive, for several reasons, aside from general human fluffupery:
1. As with ride-sharing, Amazon and other online ventures, the first step for the dominant online provider is to put brick-and-mortar companies out of business by making prices very low. This doesn't just give them greater leverage over the consumer, but it also shifts the workforce from an organized one to a diffuse, un-unionized, screwable population. If you join Airbnb you will be as valued and cherished as an Uber driver. Don't think 'Airbnb gets a cut of my take, so surely the more money I make the more money they make.' Think 'Airbnb is in the phase of crushing hotels, and to do that they need to crush their hosts, too.' In every way they can, Airbnb will try to push your prices down. (You can say 'I won't rely on their suggested price,' --don't!--but in the leaner times their suggested prices become a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
2. Time is money. If you get in a problem where a drunken guest takes your jade lamp and tries to impale someone else, meanwhile leaving several large holes in your kitchen wall--just saying--and you hope Airbnb will refund you in a timely manner--No. Maybe you'll expect a stall, because every day they delay is more money for them and less for you. You can expect to be dicked around (depreciating the value of the jade lamp because... jade fades? Rather than using replacement value). But really no matter how hard you try to prepare yourself, you can have no idea how crushingly horrible, inconvenient and deliberately dehumanizing the 'resolution' process is. (And my host isn't even disputing!) So here are things to think about:
- of course there is the full-time job of tracking your things and their condition, keeping receipts, etc
- in your disaster planning, realize that you can't count on Airbnb to pay for repairs in a timely manner, and this could mean YOU WILL BE SHUT DOWN so that while you are sitting in your drafty kitchen, you will not only be frustrated as heck but you will also have lost your income for an indeterminate amount of time. My damages were over $7,000. I can't float that. Could you?
- Imagine the worst, most unresponsive, most 'riddled by rules and ruled by riddles' federal bureaucracy and then multiply that by 10. There are three separate departments, one for extra cleaning costs, one for repairs and one for broken rules. And they don't talk to each other. (Why should they? Delay is good for them.) So budget your time for this morass--and I include their wretched resolution platform in this! It is a bottomless well.
- The delay is a feature, not a bug. I resisted the conclusion that the de-humanizing is also a feature, a deliberate pattern, but actually I am happier now that I admit the obvious. They really could not accidentally be so horrible. I felt like Charlie trying to just at least touch the football... For example in the now 10 weeks since the hole-bashing event, I have not received one call from my case manager, but I have repeatedly been getting little teases 'send me your telephone number' (because Airbnb doesn't have my number?) I respond. But of course, no call. You can't do crap like that 4 times and have it be an accident.
- And this is not a lower-level staff issue. This is a management issue. It seems likely it is being managed exactly the way Airbnb wants it to be managed.
If you do decide to do Airbnb despite this warning, my other advice is: keep your sense of humor. They really do have the power to exert considerable practical harm, but if you can laugh at them at least it doesn't have to go soul-deep. They won't have your back. They are not well-intentioned towards you. To expect that is a recipe for misery. Plan accordingly.
Good luck--
Carie
