Community Support during COVID-19

Aisling
Level 9
Howth, Ireland

Community Support during COVID-19

Hello everyone,

 

My name is Aisling and I manage our global Community Support Team. Over the past three months, we have been hit by an unprecedented wave of challenges due to the spread of COVID-19.

 

My job is to ensure that you and the rest of our community have the support you need, especially at this difficult time and make sure we have the resources in place to do so. However, at a time where support is needed even more than ever, our team has been faced with some of the hardest challenges we’ve ever experienced.

 

In light of this, I wanted to share some of these experiences with you and most importantly what we’ve been doing about it and what we are currently working on.

 

Sudden and unprecedented volume of calls

As you may know, we have offices and support centers in locations across the world, but we rely on all of them to help with the volume of support we receive. The challenges we’ve seen here are:

 

  • Our China team was the first to be impacted, dealing with volumes 600% above what we had planned for. The quarantine shut down our China office and one of our Customer Support sites.
  • Once the WHO announced COVID-19 as a global pandemic, our global ticket volumes rose 400% above what we planned.

 

What’ve we done:

 

  • The China team contributed over 100K of working hours during the Lunar New Year to manage the call volumes. We also built a self-solve and chat bot tool to manage the volume in just two weeks
  • Our teams rallied and formed a task force, covering operations, engineering, legal and partner management teams, that met multiple times a day to tackle the issue

 

Office shutdowns

As the virus spread, all of our internal offices were required to shut down quite abruptly and all of our teams had to change to a work from home mode.

 

  • Our partner sites where we manage the majority of tickets were also required to be shut down by the government and local authorities. This meant we temporarily lost almost 80% of our global community support network within days.

 

What’ve we done:

 

  • We had to get laptops enabled and distributed to 7,000 specialists across 25 sites around the world.
  • Within a matter of one week, we had moved around 70% of partner specialists to working from home

 

Where are we now

We’ve done a lot in a short period of time, but as you can imagine we are still working through our backlog.

  • We are currently working through technical and regional constraints to enable all of our teams to connect to the phone lines.
  • We are under pressure on our phone lines, in particular English and Portuguese.
  • As a result, we have shortened hours of operations temporarily, but are working to get them back to normal hours as soon as possible.

 

We also launched a new initiative that temporarily redeploys Airbnb staff to the Community Support team to help us more quickly meet your needs. Things are moving rapidly and so we hope you see a difference in response time very shortly.

 

Finally...

I am incredibly proud of how our teams have rallied together in such a short amount of time to serve our community and we are all working around the clock to continue to support you.

 

I can’t imagine how difficult it has been for all of you with these unprecedented changes. We are here to listen and support you as much as we can. Please continue to share your feedback here in the Community Center and also through the listening sessions, I've been receiving regular updates from the community team. I will keep you posted with further updates.

 

Thank you for your support and patience while we get our team back on track and adjust to this new world.

 

Aisling

319 Replies 319

@Michelle--Misha-0 We are in a very similar situation regarding a reservation starting on April 17... Please let us know if you hear anything back from Airbnb. Best wishes, N

I will. This virus is just ramping up in Airbnb Has to do the responsible thing by extending their policy.

I came across this article which seems to reflect the situation of many guests : 

https://www.citynews1130.com/2020/03/28/hawaii-airbnb-refund-covid-19/ 

What is the process where a host refuses to grant a refund?  @Aisling  can you please help us ? Many thanks. 

It's so important to know that AIR BnB when you cancel is not giving ANY of the money to the host. I am a host wit strict cancelation and I have received not one sent from those that have canceled. They allow the cancelations but will not allow me as the host to cancel the guests

 

Exactly- I’ve been a host, superhost, for nine years. It’s my full time job. 
   I’m so disappointed in Airbnb, no offer to help me ( their 25 million bailout to superhosts ??- did anyone get this help ??). I’ve gotten two payments adding up to $1000. For over $30,000. Worth of reservations that have now cancelled.
   I’m so mad at Airbnb, I don’t think I can ever do business with them again. 

Just extending the policy will not help the hosts. Many of whom will go bankrupt and have no income is no $ help from abnb

I’m a host and had a guest cancel a reservation for August. It was a wedding and they’ve since postponed the event a whole year. I’m totally fine with their cancelation however it was still showing on my calendar. When I asked Airbnb about it they told me because the reservation was made more than 90 days  ahead this is the policy:

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2728/what-options-do-i-have-for-canceling-a-reservation-for-a-pl... 
I sent it to the guest and hope they get their $ back! 
We have a moderate cancellation policy so they can and will get our fees, it’s the extra Airbnb charges that may be held up.! I thought the government $ is suppose to help businesses like Airbnb so that refunding folks ought to be a no. 1 no strings attached  deal!

Julie, I'm a host and hoping you can help me. We had a guest cancel for arrival after April 16. I want to totally refund her but when I click through the "issue full refund" button, it takes me to "send money" and says it will take the money from my "payment account." I don't know if that means my checking account. i have not been paid on this reservation and don't want it to pull from my checking. Customer Service hasn't replied after a week.  Any insight is helpful, thank you!

I guess you need to check in your future payout if it shows the amount of that booking it means you will get that money in your account and meanwhile you can contact guest and tell her once you get that amount credited you can send her money ...sometimes it takes times to get payouts...

I am having the same problem. My check in date was April 15th in Nashville which along with the virus also had a tornado.  I live in Ca. and we know it will still not be safe to travel.  They are supposed to take the 2nd payment off of my card on March 31st.  I am afraid I am going to have to cancel my card to prevent that, but then how would they refund me? 

I really understand - and I'm a host!  I have bookings through May and June and would love to cancel them.  My husband is in the "at risk" category and, while I too rely on my BnB income, I don't want to make the spread of this virus any easier or put anyone in more danger than necessary.  It's all of our responsibilities.  I'm sure AirBnB will update their extenuating circumstances policy though.  They'll have to!

Trudi15
Level 5
Zürich, Switzerland

they need to compensate us and get much more $$ from the feds to cover all cancellations , otherwise just extending the extenuating will not help us. I have closed my rooms now because I am over 60 and my husband also in risk category

 

I am in the same situation. I'm out of the country and won't be back in the states to get my listings ready for summer because I am in a safe area.  I'm an at risk person due to my age and I do all my own cleaning. I and don't want to put myself at risk to travel or to be cleaning after each guest. I want to  cancel all my reservations but want to know how to proceed. I haven't seen anything that address my situation. Also what happens to the security deposit? 

Hi ! I was wondering if you’ve considered hiring a co-host to take care of the details you don’t want /can’t anymore ? Then you wouldn’t lose all the income, or your status. Just a thought. 😄

You agreed to pay 50% if the trip had to be canceled right?

 

Not much difference whether it’s because you got sick, death in the family, or a million other contingencies.  It’s what you agreed to.  The difference between you and your host is that you will miss out on a vacation that you had the money to afford to take in the first place.  Your host still has to pay a mortgage.