Dear AirBnB
I was given a budget of $25k to find housing for our crew for a month in a place where there are no available hotel rooms and AirBnBs only last for a while (it's a huge event). This one huge gig accounts for about 1/3 of my company's revenue each year.
So I was delighted to find a place big enough and right under budget enough that I could house our crew in luxury. These guys work hard so why not?
Anyway, the host called me days later and after a bit under $25k was taken from my business bank account to inform me that they sold the property and forgot to take the listing down. It was unavailable.
I panicked a little, but there were still places to be had so I reserved two other homes. My guys would be split up and the diggs would be more "normal" but that's OK. It happens...
But the refund was being transferred back to my account so AirBnB got a decline from my bank on one of the properties due to lack of funds.
No worries, I thought. I'll just initiate the pull again once the refund is in my account and we'll be good to go.
But little did I know that this is not doable on the AirBnB platform. I'm not sure if it's a glitch or if the manual payment link is legacy code from before bank payments, but it isn't there.
So I hop on support chat.
What I learned about support chat is that each new person "helping" only has access to the last couple messages so I then spent an embarrassing amount of time explaining the whole thing to each new agent. Each agent then didn't bother to read it and respond by linking the manual payment link... I was told to go to this link... Maybe 12 times?
Each time I'd trying to explain myself and each time they would just send me that link. For days and hours....
Enter the phone.
A similar experience. They were all very nice and really tried to help me, but they are trained to help with user error and it was very clear that any first tier person answering the phone could not help.
I eventually (and rather politely) refused to get off the phone on the 3rd or 4th call until we solved this. My refusal elevated me to a person who seemed to have more knowledge and possibly more access.
He said he further elevated the case to a "Team" of some sort and we made an appointment for the next morning to try and reset whatever lock was on making bank payments by canceling the reservation and quickly re-doing it with him on the system to force through a quick confirmation.
Seemed logical to me. Maybe the system refused to allow further bank payments on the reservation after one decline... Seemed like something a help agent should be able to reset or disable, but whatever. Teamwork makes the dream work.
I woke up to a message that said the "team" had a workaround and they'd handle it so there was no need to do the quick cancellation thing. It should be solved that day. OK great! I get my morning back.
So I'm laying in bed last night (now this morning) and I get a message from this super-special ninja support team. In short, it says: We can't fix it but we're happy to give you a link to the manual payment...
So I spent a lot more time on the phone while my family sleeps with a new tier 1 agent who certainly tried her best. I know the game so I refused to get off the phone when she took me through the whole song and dance again.
While this was happening, I was able to get a drastic credit increase on my personal credit card and just paid with that...
I'm not supposed to. It's a nightmare to get reimbursed and do the accounting... But it can't be as bad or time consuming as this has been.
AirBnB: Give out your escrow info! I really wanted to ACH or wire you the money. I would have dropped off a check! Courier pigeon! Paper airplanes make of currency! TAKE MY MONEY!
I'm typing this here because it's calming me down. I realize it's a bit of a weird situation, but it highlights a blanked of corporate policy that disempowers employees to act as anything but soothing LLMs. Nobody could make any decisions or come up with any solutions outside of me using the platform on the user-end.
And it wasn't for some kind of dispute or insurance thing or other complication. This was the inability of an apparatus to take money from me. A platform that's built for this.
I don't know how much money AirBnB is going to lose by me and my company trying other platforms. I'm sure it's insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But disempowering your support staff to do any real support can erode your credibility and pollute your story in the long run.
I stress-tested your system and it failed badly. If I were a hired auditor, this would be the part where I'd tack on my invoice and remittance info. Remittance info. Remittance info! You guys, it's so easy to pay me. Why was it hard to pay you?
