Hello AirBnB Community,
**All AirBnB messages pasted at bottom**
I’ve been a very active member of the AirBnB platform for the past 5 years. This is my first time posting. However - our situation has become very dire and I'm reaching out to you all before taking further action. A bit of background on me, I‘m an 8-time consecutive super host. As a host, I have over 170 reviews and a blended average rating of 4.95. I know what it takes to be a great host and a great guest.
17 days ago my wife and I began a 36-night stay as travelers at a home. At the same time, we’re still hosting multiple guests at multiple locations that we manage. Since the beginning of this 36-night stay, we’ve had problems. Many features of the house that we expected to work have not been functional. A lot of items were not provided clean and there was absolutely no documentation during check-in. Whenever we have communicated with the absentee owners, they have been very defensive and reactive. We have since stopped even communicating our concerns and just living with the issues that include no hot water, no filtered water, no dishwasher, no functional spa, etc. This booking cost approximately $9000 so it wasn’t cheap.
Suddenly 2 days ago, we get a message from Airbnb telling us that the reservation has been canceled. “That Airbnb can no longer support this reservation.” No explanation. Keep in mind we are on day 17 of our 36 day stay. AirBnB demands that we check out immediately. Of course, we are in the middle of the highest demand time of the year in Santa Barbara and there’s nowhere to go. Furthermore, my wife is 8 months pregnant and we are concerned about Covid.
It took all day but we finally reached Airbnb. We spoke to someone who barely spoke English. They gave us no explanation and told us we must check out immediately. They said that the booking has been canceled and they were going to conduct an investigation and only until after we check out will they tell us why the booking was canceled. Again I would like to remind my community here that we have been impeccable guests and have followed all of the guidelines even though there were very few provided. Yes, we did let the owners know in the first week about some of these problems but that was our duty as responsible guests and as paying clients.
Airbnb continues to send messages telling us to check out and until we do they can’t tell us what’s going on. On top of that, we discover that they have disabled all our listings we manage as hosts !!! Our listings are now no longer visible on the platform. We have a few reservations that are still active in the future but no new reservations. We again escalated this to Airbnb sending emails and calling but no one has gotten back to us.
We contacted the host Owners and told them about what’s happening. They told us they contacted Airbnb and requested that the contract be canceled because we broke the house rules. I asked them what House rules are not being followed and they agreed ultimately that that wasn’t exactly true. That it was a “misunderstanding”. We recorded the entire conversation. We let Airbnb know that we have this documented and recorded and that we have not broken any rules and the host simply wanted to cancel the contract.
Still, nothing from Airbnb and our listings are all still inactive. I cannot believe this is happening. I am in such disbelief that there has been no communication and no dispute process whatsoever. The notion that our 36-day booking can be arbitrarily canceled and on top of that our active listings disabled is preposterous. We have done nothing wrong. We have been great users of the platform. I am taking this step communicating with all of you to find out what to do and how to reach someone at Airbnb who can actually address this problem.
Please let me know. We really appreciate your help in advance.
Brent Masters
Here are the messages from AirBnB - curious that they state "there may be a potential breach of our terms of service by your host."
**[Sensitive information removed in line with - Community Center Guidelines]