We recently had a very stressful and upsetting experience with 2 guests who violated our House Rules and was only "resolved" when we called the police. How Airbnb did NOT support us during and after the incident which led to a revenge review suggests that little has changed and it is all PR when the new policy on "biased reviews" was introduced last year post Orinda.
@Stephanie you should take note since any host who would take the time to read this would likely also come to the conclusion we as hosts are unfairly treated and punished twice by these guests who manipulate the review system.
We are experienced Superhosts and have a flat in a terrace house (where there are other flats). We took a booking in Feb by "P" and "A". During the booking process, we asked them to review and accept our House Rules, which we ask every guest. In fact, P messaged us they accept our Rules AND highlighted one we specifically mentioned--"no external guests".
We received praise for our flat and travel tips until one evening during the middle of their stay when we were alerted P and A had arranged for two unauthorised visitors to enter our building and presumably our flat--the former was confirmed via outside security camera, the existence of which is noted clearly on our listing, and which was only reviewed after we were contacted by building management regarding the violation. We immediately reached out to P with several Airbnb messages and tried to call P but we were ignored.
We went to our building to speak to them via the building intercom and calmly and politely reminded them of our clearly listed House Rules and request the visitors to leave. P came outside and began raising his voice, rudely and arrogantly saying that he could have anyone inside he wanted to, because “we paid for it”. He was very aggressive--we calmly asked him to lower his voice so as to NOT disturb our neighbours--and began to physically and verbally threaten us, asserting he would make us pay in our review. The 4 of them left the house shortly. ***Much of this was captured on video.***
Later the same night we were alerted that P again had unauthorised visitors inside our home, which was confirmed on the external building security camera. From that point P refused to communicate in any way. We contacted Airbnb CS, advised them of the situation and requested they get in touch with P. We had to go through one escalation, retell our story even after we asked them to read the message thread and send them frame shots (rather than the entire video), were told they need time to review it. The CS Manager ended up taking off for the night--as we discovered when we called CS 90 minutes later to check if any action was taken. So we had to begin a second round of escalation, put on hold, send videos, told they needed to review it, etc.
The next morning we began a third round of calls with CS which prompted CS to finally take action--P continued to ignore all messages, phone calls, etc. At this point Airbnb CS cancelled his booking for repeatedly violating House Rules in having unauthorised guests and for subsequently ignoring all attempts at communication. P did finally write us back once, stating that he refused to leave our home unless Airbnb found him alternative accomodation. Despite being given multiple extensions and a final departure deadline of 1.30pm, P and A had still not left the property by 3pm, and refused to answer any messages, phone calls, or even answer our home intercom as I personally stood at the front door, afraid for my personal safety to go inside my own home. We were forced to call the police to assist in ensuring P and A left our home, which they finally did only after police arrived at 3:30pm.
But the nightmare was not over for us. P carried out his threat a few days later and submitted a revenge review (1-star). His review included a number of factual errors--he claimed we never contacted him before he heard from us on the intercom (we have an Airbnb message trail to disprove that), that we were angry and aggressive towards him (we have on video we asked him to lower his voice and he was the aggressor) and his two guests were a niece and her friend (we have no definitive proof, but our video showed they didn't know each other until that night and F and A used fake names to introduce themselves to the ladies at the building front door. Neither women mentioned once they are relatives during F's angry rants).
It's also somewhat irrelevant what their relations or nature of the interactions were--he basically admitted he had unauthorised guests. P also wrote it was his human rights to have conversations with the women. He also claimed Airbnb CS sent him a message to APOLOGISE for the unpleasant experience for HIM (apparently CS did in fact do this BLINDLY ignoring the messages, etc...as we later found out!!!).
We immediately called Airbnb after P's review was posted and went over our case, again with Airbnb message trail and video evidence. Despite clear evidence of falsehood in P's review, our video, Airbnb CS cancelling their booking (so someone at CS was convinced there was enough grounds to do this), Airbnb after their review denied our request to have the revenge review and the 1-star rating removed.
This leads to the following observations...
The "biased review" policy is just PR. Our case is as clear cut as it gets--when the guests actually said they were going to write a revenge review! What further proof do we need? Airbnb has sided with unscrupulous guests whom they kicked out by cancelling the booking. Oh wait, we got the police to move them while Airbnb did nothing.
It doesn't matter whether it's 2 unauthorised guest, 20 or 200...it's the principle. You would think after Orinda, Airbnb would actually take these violations seriously instead of allowing us hosts to be punished TWICE. What further proof do we need?
If unscrupulous guests can violate Rules and explicitly threaten hosts with no consequences whilst we get punished losing our Superhost status, one asks what foundational trust is left?
Thank you for reading this.
