@Cathy239
I am so sorry someone with your experience has come across this situation.
There are a few observations here.
The guest was just plain unreasonable....but some of them are like that Cathy! I don't know your situation but it could be that the cottage had not been occupied for a couple of days, and I don't care how good someone is at cleaning, insects are never going remain at bay for long. I have had the odd cockroach, ants invaded once when a sticky dessert was left on the kitchen bench. One couple even got woken up in the middle of the night by a possum nibbling away at the fruit in a bowl on the bench, God only knows how it got in there, I felt like bloody Basil Fawlty in that British comedy series!
But Cathy these things are going to happen and as you have found out in the past most guests are reasonable and will laugh it off. People are strange creatures though and when these individuals found a couple of insects, they probably went on a 'witch hunt' searching for bugs and could have come across something else, who knows! You live in a rural area and it is possible they found something else to have a grizzle about and just lumped the lot in together and said the cottage was....'full of bugs'!
On another level Cathy, and please don't think I am criticising you, I am trying to establish why Noah was relatively inflexible here in a situation that was clearly out of character.....and some of that could have been in your approach. It may have been better to, instead of thumping him with the thesaurus about bug numbers said......"Noah I am disturbed what this is going to do to me. You can see I have 200+ great Airbnb reviews, never a mention of insects before across any of my listings, so this probably says more about the guest than it says about me or my hosting. This is just from one of those reviews 'The guys were thrilled to be in a spotless and cozy house'! Can you understand what a 1 will do to me Noah...I could be suspended for a 1, I could loose certain priviledges, and Airbnb could loose a great host.... As there are some wild inacuracies here, is there some way you can keep my great record intact and consider removing this review on this occasion"
Cathy it can be done. There is currently one Airbnb Superhost who has a perfect review record, but this particular host is the subject of the most vitriolic comments on another large web site with a considerable number of disgruntled guests saying their reviews of this host have been removed. The only reviews that remain are this hosts positive ones. I have worked in support and I can say it should not happen but Cathy, maybe it does!
I think the way you approach a problem has a big baring on it's outcome. It may be too late with this particular CS agent because I would doubt he would escalate your case to a supervisor....nobody likes to look incompetent.
Your best course of action may be to approach CS through another avenue, such as Twitter.
Airbnb seems to have dedicated staff who monitor their Twitter feeds and users will usually hear back from them within 5-10 minutes of posting an isssue. I have no personal knowledge of that Cathy but many users suggest this is the case
Step 1: Log into Twitter
Step 2: Search for @Airbnbhelp and choose "Follow" them.
Step 3: Send a Direct Message (DM) explaining your issue and wait for their response. They may ask for information such as your listing but always provide it over DM so it is not public and it may mean a bit of repetition but you may have a stronger chance of success if you approach this, asking what can be done rather than saying what 'should' be done.
All the best with it Cathy I hope you can get somewhere.
Cheers.....Rob