We had a guest, who has explicitly agreed to follow our house rules which was explicitly agreed upon on the Airbnb messaging thread. We received a complaint from a different guest in another unit about the guest that he is being extremely loud at 2 A.M. in the morning. We respectfully knocked on their door to notify to keep the noise down and follow our rules which he agreed once again. However the same later morning, we received the same complaint saying that the guest kept violating the rules and threw a party at 5:30am. We reached out to the guest to follow up but did not receive a response for a long time. We checked the status in the building and discovered signs of partying and blatant violation of house rules which we uploaded to airbnb messaging as proof. At this point we notified him that we are removing him. However, he decided to continue to lie and make up lies that he didn't party and that we called him a slur to make us responsible for his violation of our rules. He even called the police to falsely claim that there was cash left behind at the unit, which the police found not to be true after coming inside the unit and investigating.
At this point a case manager Margaret from "Safety Team" reached out to us via email and in her exact quote said "If I don’t hear from you within 72 hours, Airbnb may move forward with removing you from the community." without giving us any details why. This seemed very unfair in the first place because we have over 400 reservations per year and is an experienced host and the fact that they would just threaten us to remove without getting all the details or even reading the message thread between us and the guest.
After responding to her email, we received no response from her, but Sean from "internal team" reached out to us to tell us that we are getting a warning for nondiscrimination policy for a slur that a guest alleges? when we responded, we were not given a chance to even speak on the phone or given a chance to respond or provided with any proof. Sean's response in exact quote was "Please consider this a first and final warning. " I work on a small team that specifically handles concerns related to our Nondiscrimination Policy; due to the sensitive nature of cases that my team handles we do not make phone calls."
Essentially we were being punished for enforcing OUR house rules and airbnb decided to believe guest's lies even after we presented proof that guest violated rules and lied to us, and he has no credibility?
If we are punished for enforcing our own house rules or guests lie explicitly and don't follow them anyway what good is any "house rules"? In this case since the guest contacted airbnb first, "guest experience team"'s case manager was assigned first. In the past cases which we have records of, we have found that generally they are biased to side with guests automatically before they hear both sides which we find very unfair. Another reason we feel this way is that it is extremely hard to cancel an ongoing reservation without penalty when guests are violating rules. For example, airbnb system online does not allow us to cancel a reservation when its "ongoing" we must only call to cancel, then I have to talk to the initial representative to explain, and then wait for them to evaluate and finally assign a case manager who doesn't often get on the phone right away. One case manager even told us that it also counts against 3 free cancellation even though guest violated our house rules.
Although we are very grateful for airbnb for giving us hosts platforms. I am honestly upset sometimes at how we are treated as hosts because of how cases and reservations are handled. I think we need to open up a discussion and see also other hosts have similar experiences.
