Airbnb Host Desperately Need Help

[Hadrian1]

Hi. I am a super host with over 4000 reviews.

I am a professional host and I make a living by managing Airbnb rentals.

It has been a hard year for everyone, especially when you make a living from Airbnb.

The worst part is, Airbnb supposed to be your ally and assist you. But Airbnb reps only listen to the guest and never even gave me the opportunity for a fair trial. I have requested to speak to my supervisor many times, and never got replied.

I give you few examples:

1. A guest claimed that he got bit by bed bugs in my home. The guest submitted a doctor's note to Airbnb showing that the guest got bit by an insect. Without consulting me, the guest was awarded a full refund and my listing was deactivated. I had to call the pest control company to provide an inspection (at my cost) and show that my property is clear from bed bugs and insects. But regardless, the guest has been fully refunded. The guest could have gotten bit by anything. An insect bite can be fleas, ticks, mosquitos, and the guest can bit anywhere, in the park, on the grass, etc. It is unfair that the guest got a full refund by this allegation.

2. A guest book a room for his son. The son used drugs in our home and invite homeless people to the house. We got threatened by the homeless/criminal that he does not want to leave. We called the mother who is in another country. The mother apologized and admitted on the AIRBNB APP that the son has a substance abuse problem. We had to call the police and change all the locks in the house. We submit a resolution request for damages two days later which the mother refused to pay. We escalate the matter to Airbnb and Airbnb replied: because we accepted other guests in the house it was hard to determine who invited the homeless. For that reason, the reps say it is against Airbnb policy to claim the insurance. The rep then closed the case. Once your case is closed, you can not even communicate with the rep anymore. It is unfair and the denial excuse does not make any sense. The mother admitted all fault that was done by her son on the Airbnb app.

3. A trans woman booked to stay in our home. This person invited unauthorized guest, smokes marijuana inside the room and smell the whole house, get drunk, pee on the floor, and start being hostile, and much more. We called the police but the police will not remove the guest until the reservation got canceled. We called Airbnb and I was put on hold for over one hour and thirty minutes and the call got disconnected. We called Airbnb again, and the support ambassador could not help unless putting us on hold again until a case manager or someone from trust and safety team picks up the phone. The immediate action that the support ambassador could do is to do cancellation by host. Because the situation with the guest escalated and the police could not act until the reservation got cancelled, we had no choice to agree. We prioritized our safety and the other guest's safety. The guest was refunded in full and our calendar was blocked. To put more salts to the wound, the Airbnb rep contacted us because we call the guest with the pronoun "he", we discriminated against a Trans Woman and my account is being noted for violation. This person has a male gender name, masculine look, and in the heat of argument we call her by "he".  I tried to explain to the rep that I am a gay man and we don't have any intention to discriminate. I ask the Airbnb rep to consider the whole situation and he replied essentially say it does not matter what the guest did nor how she behaved in the house, but the fact that we mistakenly call him by a he was enough for us to be penalized. 

4. A guest claimed that our room has an odor. The guest contacted the Airbnb rep asking for a full refund after 5 night stays and the Rep immediately sent us an email saying that we are in violation for not providing a cleanroom. I told the rep why did the guest had to wait for 5 nights and then ask for a refund? We asked if we can go to the room to check the source of the odor and the guest refused. We have 5 stars average rating in cleanliness. The guest has 0 reviews. I asked the rep to be fair to us and to our reputation history. The rep replied cockily that we are in violation and that his decision was final. I told the rep if the room truly has an odor why are we not allowed to check the room? The rep then added a new allegation saying that we lied about our amenity and that we did not provide internet service. I said that is not true. I sent a screenshot of our internet speed. I also ask the rep to contact our other Airbnb guests in the same property to see if they can connect to our wifi. No one has an issue connecting to our wifi. We offered to help the guest connect to the wifi in which the guest refused. If the guest truly has a wifi issue, why are we not allowed to help? But regardless, Airbnb noted our account again for violation in cleanliness and no internet. I requested to speak to a supervisor, and until today, no replied.

I have much much more stories where we, the host, with over 4000 reviews and have hosted 6000 guests treated like garbage by Airbnb reps. Every week a new insult and humiliation by Airbnb reps. Airbnb rep continues to become our prosecutors and the judge. The host is not given a chance for a fair trial. Airbnb reps can simply close the case and your communication stop. I have advocated for Airbnb. We are a responsible host that follow the law, respect our neighbors, and only try to make a living. I don't understand why Airbnb treated us so poorly.

I am desperate. I have multiple jobs, and my primary income is doing Airbnb. But there is only so much more I can take from Airbnb reps. Thank you for reading my post. Please if you know anyone that can provide justice to me, please let me know. Thank you.

[Hadrian1]

Good Morning, @Nick. Greeting from LA.

Thank you for taking the time to clarify what you mean.

I am aware that you are trying to help me here, and I don't want to feel that I am ungrateful and in turn questioning your response.

But may I ask why do you single out @helen350 and @sarah977?

You did not call out @andrew0 for calling @helen350 with "it"? 

Why is that. That clearly makes @helen350 does not feel welcome. Do you agree to that? If yes, then why did you not call him out as you call out the ladies? Are you discriminating against them because they are women?

I know the answer. The answer is of course not. I believe you are a good man. You might miss what Andrew said by simply not reading it, or read it, but not having a thought that it is offensive, but regardless I am 100% sure you don't mean to single out @helen350 and @sarah977. Like you said mistakes happen. If @helen350 and @sarah977 made a big deal of out this, I would have defended you as well (although I am sure you don't need it).

But you shun @helen350 and @sarah977 in a public forum just because of your subjective interpretation of the Airbnb guidelines. You also interpret their statement subjectively. I showed @sarah977 comment to a few of my 20s friends and none of them were offended. Everyone understands that overall of course age makes a difference in someone's life experience. I do disagree with @sarah977 but I don't see it as a big deal because I don't think her intent is malicious. But it almost feels that you slice and dice our words with intent to find something wrong.

This world rapidly changing. What was used to be acceptable is no longer being accepted. There is #metoo movement, there is #blacklivesmatter, there is #pride, and much more. All of these are beautiful things. But we should not punish or shun generations that have different values than us or just because of the way they speak. It is painful for other people to not understand my value, but I will not force my value onto them, cause otherwise, I am the same as them. 

You preached empathy. If you preached empathy, can you feel our pain for being discriminated against, degraded, humiliated by Airbnb reps repeatedly, and publicly? I have cried over the deep injustice and scream at the top of my lung when no one cares. I have to make the neighbors happy, the landlord happy, the guests happy, can at least Airbnb become my ally at my time of needs? Instead, I have to wait for hours for the Trust and Safety team to get back to me, actually no; wait for hours for them NOT to get back at me. I have to deal with the problem myself. 

How do you think I feel, as a gay man to be called out and noted on my account for violation by Airbnb rep for allegations of discriminating against transgender. My whole business of Airbnb is welcoming people from all backgrounds. You can see the rainbow flag proudly presented in my profile pictures.

My dignity has been raped multiple times by Airbnb reps. Yes, you can say you follow the Airbnb policy. But you have to look at the whole situation. The policy is a guideline, it can not be black and white. Exemptions and special circumstances, especially when you are dealing with people, will always apply. We are not an animal.  What I shared here is just the tip of an iceberg. I have endured so much more pain because of Airbnb inequality treatment, whether it is on purpose or not. I can go on and on for the many many years I have been a host with examples and I can back it up. I post the screenshot that the moderator keep taking down. But I post the screenshot because I want people to know that I am not making it up.

Every mistake that the Airbnb reps made, they did not pay for that. Saying sorry is cheap. I am tired of the Rep saying sorry for the other Rep mistake. I PAY FOR THEIR MISTAKE. I pay when they "accidentally" refund guests in full; when they unlisted my listing based on guest allegations without proof, I pay. I am the one that gotten woken up in the middle of the night when guests throw an unauthorized party. I have to deal with the cops. And where is Airbnb when I needed them the most? Until today, every time they said a supervisor will contact me back, no one ever did.

I would love it if someone higher up from your team can contact me. No one should have gone through so much humiliation as much as I did. The worst part is I stuck with it because this seems the only source of income that can work for me. I support my whole family, my mom, my sister, and myself.  Now that I have 88 listings, I am responsible for a group of people's income that also relies on me. So yes, I whine. I whine and I did not quit. I whine, whine, whine. So please have mercy for me.

Thank you.

[Anonymous]

@Hadrian1  I might have misjudged how clearly my intentions would land, but the "it pronoun" post was meant as an illustration of how being called by the wrong pronoun feels to a transgender person. I'm sorry if my sacrastic tributary of the discussion muddied the waters of your own struggle, which I think is a different one. You were wrongly accused of being prejudiced against trans identities because you used what you thought was the correct pronoun.  I agree with @Helen350  that this was an injustice, but she took her point much farther to the position that you should always be able to address people as the gender you think they should be assigned to, rather than the one they identify with. I don't think that someone who holds this opinion has any right to complain when someone else misgenders them with a pronoun - sauce for the gander, sauce for the goose, sauce for the non-binary poultry. I also controversially referred to her as a "small-town Boomer," not because I think that's an inherently bad thing, but because it's relevant that this demographic is not using the same playbook as urban Millennials such as the people running Airbnb.

I'm all for Airbnb clearing a path toward making global travel safer for trans people, and I don't think it's a bad thing if they cut off hosts who genuinely mistreat them. But I think a huge part of the problem is that the current customer service operation is really lacking in skill and insight - it's most likely an outsourced contractor working from home and stuck to a script - and the caseworkers you've had to deal with weren't given the time or training to process the nuances of your situation. 

I hope that @Nick 's efforts to escalate your case help you get a fair resolution to your issues, and please report back when you have results!

p.s.:  88 listings - wow, when you're operating on that scale it seems inevitable that you're going to get every kind of guest imaginable, from the best to the worst. I know 88 is a lucky number in some cultures, but in Germany it means something very different...

[Helen350]

Now I'm thinking that I quite like being a "small town boomer" @Anonymous !

Rest assured, if a trans person were to book with me, I would offer hospitality & kindness, just as I do with all my guests! And if a trans person +1 were to stay, I would NOT refer to +1's trans friend by the pronoun of the birth gender just to be awkward, because I would not want to be seen to be being intentionally hurtful.... 

But these things work both ways, and just as it is honouring to the trans person, not to use the 'wrong pronoun', surely the other party deserves the honour of not being manipulated and forced to express a sentiment with which they disagree? 

Are you aware of the Asher's Bakery case in Northern Ireland, where a bakery firm were cleared of discrimination, on the basis that they were entitled not to ice a slogan on a cake, when the slogan was a sentiment with which they profoundly disagreed? They were not declining a service; they would have happily sold the purchaser a plain cake, or one saying "Happy Birthday", but they could not in all conscience promote a philosophy that went against their religious convictions. They were wanting to remain the arbiter of what words they transmitted.

- So my theoretical musings above were in the light of the Asher's case; namely can an individual or corporate body dictate the words of another???

I'm asking  not telling.

[Anonymous]

@Helen350  I'm familiar with the gay cake debates, but they were never about a corporate body dictating the words of another - that's the most persistently frustrating misunderstanding of the whole thing. The reason that you heard so much more about the cake controversies than so many of the millions of other banal examples of homophobic discrimination is that there's no strict legal consensus on whether a decorated cake is speech or food.

Where discrimination laws exist, they generally prohibit public accommodations from denying a service to a group of people protected by the law. Those accommodations tend to include bakeries and restaurants and grocery stores, which makes a certain sense because if all such places discriminated against the same group, that group would not be able to eat. But they don't include services such as having your portrait painted or having your biography written, so freelance painters and writers are allowed all degrees of bias in their choice of subjects.

A decorated cake is fundamentally a foodstuff sold in a public accommodation, but it happens to involve a kind of speech and artistry, which makes it really hard to pin down as one or the other. As it happens, Airbnb listings tend to occupy a similar grey area, and there's still a lot of controversy over whether they should be held to the standards of public accommodations. 

[Sarah977]

@Helen350 Addressing someone by the pronoun they prefer has nothing to do with our "sentiment".

I think there's a lot bigger issues to concern oneself with than whether one uses the preferred pronoun, but I can understand that it could be important to someone who's suffered a lot of discrimination and emotional turmoil over their gender identity.

An interesting fact that I recently became aware of- about 1 out of every 1500 babies  are born with "ambiguous" genitalia. That's quite a lot. They may have external organs of one sex and internal of another or any number of variations on the theme. It used to be the common practice for the parents to decide to raise them as male or female, and medically unnecessary operations were done on these children. It led to some pretty sexually and emotionally confused outcomes as these kids grew up. 

Thankfully there are more enlightened parents of these intersex babies now who are opting to respect the way their child was born, letting them decide their own gender identity as they get older, which may be one or the other or both. And it has led to much happier lives for these kids.

My youngest daughter was quite androgenous looking as a child, liked her hair cut short and wasn't into frilly pink things, or dolls, she was very physically active and preferred riding her bike, gymnastics, swimming, etc.

We were out one day when she was about 8 and she held the store door open for an elderly man with a cane. He said "Thank you,  son. You're a good boy."  When he was out of earshot we both broke out laughing.

[Hadrian1]

Hi @Anonymous 

First of all, thank you for your support as a cis-man to GLBT community. As someone from that community, it feels good to have you as an Ally. From what I understand, you are fighting for someone's right to be called a pronoun that they identify with.

@Helen350 is fighting for someone's right to call someone with their assigned gender. But not because out of hate or discrimination but simply goes back to the most fundamental right, freedom of speech.  

But if both of you guys look it my way, both of you agreed that my unintentional mistake should be just that. Both of you agree that if it was intentional, then I deserved the punishment. @helen350 agrees by saying even a transperson book with her, she will still offer hospitality and kindness. @andrew0 you agree because is the whole point of your argument. So we may come from a different angle, but we all agree to the same final point. 

So @Nick  and @Catherine-Powell I am looking forward to hearing from you at the end of the Airbnb investigations. I want to be treated better.

[Dave52]

@Nick Great job moderating this forum!  You stated "it really isn't anyone’s place to determine anyone else's gender identity".  I would like to clarify. 

Is it against airbnb policy for a host or guest to use gender pronouns, in written or spoken communication?   Does this also apply when communicating with CS?

The reason I ask, it seems @Hadrian1 was punished by airbnb for unknowingly using a gender pronoun.  Otherwise, it seems they did nothing wrong and they should have been supported by airbnb CS, based on the actions of the guest as given in their account of the situation.

Please clarify the policy so all of us may comply.  Thanks!

[Hadrian1]

@Dave52 Hi Dave. In my case, the CS claimed that I know; which is true, I do know. She has said that she is a trans woman before she booked. And we accepted her. That in itself should have shown to the CS that we do not discriminate by not accepting her.

A little background story here, I have 10 co-hosts. Each of my cohosts is the on-site host. In my situation, my co-host has repeatedly given the guest warning for every house rule violations, ex: smoking inside the room, unauthorized guests, drunk behavior, etc. All of my cohosts and I have an agreement because I am the listing admin, I will be the only one that will be dealing with Airbnb CS. It has happened to us in the past that Airbnb CS blatantly lie to us on who gave approval for a refund to the guest (this is another long story). So that there can be no more excuses by Airbnb CS, all of my cohosts and I agree that I will be the only one dealing with the CS.

Back to the situation, because this guest starts to get volatile, I had to call the trust and safety team. However, I was put over 1 hour and a half (I have a screenshot), and the call got disconnected. I told my cohost on the Airbnb app to call the police if "he" does not leave. 

This guest then used that and say that I discriminated against her. I called her "he" because; honestly, I don't remember each guest's unique situation. I have 88 active listings. I saw the name and the profile picture, and I refer her by "he" in the heat of the moment. 

The bottom line is the Trust and Safety Team failed to assist me. Never even bother to call me back. The police would not remove the guest without the reservation being canceled. The Airbnb support ambassador only gave me options for the cancellation by the host.

For the safety of our other guests and my cohost, we have to accept that cancellation.

The guest was fully refunded after 1 week's stay. The guest trashed the room and damage the door.

Then an email from Airbnb Rep came that I discriminated against a transwoman for calling her a "he", once!  Only Once, I call her "he" by mistake. The Airbnb reps claimed that I repeatedly calling her by "he on Airbnb App. I replied, only ONCE. Show it to me on the Airbnb App where that I say it more than once. He couldn't answer. That means he did not even bother to check the validity of the false claim before he rendered his judgment against me. The worst of it all, he refused to even give me a chance to prove my innocence. His judgment was final, and the incident will be noted in my account which may lead to deactivation.

I do this for a living. If my account gets deactivated, I will be devastated. That is why it is so unfair that I should be treated this way. In 2020, Airbnb made close to over $70,000 from my listings service fee. I deserve to be treated better. Not just from the financial point that I bring to Airbnb, but also from decency to treat a person humanely. 

[Ute42]

.

@Helen350  @Sarah977 

I'd like to assign a couple of thumbs down in this thread,

but unfortenately this funktion does not exist.

[Sarah977]

@Nick  "we have to work to ensure that everyone here in the Community is accountable to these rules. Every member should feel they are in a safe, non-discriminatory or judgmental online space."

Yes, I agree. But me making a comment that someone with psychology training would have a better understanding of how to handle host/guest disputes than  22 year old CS rep has nothing to do with that.

It has nothing to do with making anyone feel unwelcome on this forum, the CS reps do not participate here, nor are they even Airbnb employees- they are outsourced. 

And my comment wasn't age discrimination. It was just a follow up to another poster mentioning that Airbnb should have psychologists on staff and was no different than saying an electrician would have a better understanding of how to fix one's malfunctioning fan than a gardener would.

But I'll be sure never to mention the fact that a 22 year old has less life experience than someone twice their age with years of training in their field ever again. Even though no sane person would disagree, even a 22 year old.

 It really isn't necessary to look under every rock and make accusations of discrimination where there were none.

[Stephanie]

Hi everyone,

This thread has taken a side step from OP’s topic in a major way. OP has had his concerns raised internally and I am happy to continue to discuss it via DM (though as we are not customer support we cannot action anything in this case.) 

There is nothing more to be gain by arguing in this way. I welcome any who have ongoing concerns regarding the Nondiscrimination Policy to reach out to me or any of the team.

Thank you to all that remained civil and constructive with their posts.

As I am closing this topic, let’s draw a line under this and move forward positively.

Thanks,

Stephanie