We are hosts in 3 parts of the world, ME, AZ, MEX.
We are super hosts. We have 8 properties. We have in the past touted it as a means to host good people, use our properties, and make a little money. We have inspired other hosts to start hosting. However, has anyone else noticed the high influx of bad, rude, rule breaking, conning guests in their Airbnb’s? Our percentage has been creeping up from the 5%/95% bad to good, (during 2015-2017 years), 25%/75% bad to good to now.
Recently I’ve had the experience to understand this trend.
Reviews don’t matter. Bad guests can call Airbnb and have their reviews taken down and cry “policy.” We were recently exhorted $500 refund for a good review. Guest cried “snake” in our cabin to us, our knee jerk surprise was to issue a refund, not for a good review, but for such a bad experience. Explicit details how they "wrangled the snake in a jar." Wow! Didn't see that coming. I didn't even think to ask for a picture. My responsibility. Later, we find out she cried “COVID” to Airbnb just hours before with no success. When I called her on it in the private review, she called Airbnb and had my and her review taken down crying “policy.” Yes, lots of crying. Squeaky wheel MO.
Question: Were we as hosts not told, once a blind review goes up, it’s in stone for eternity, of course, with the option of rebuttal? That is the premise we have operated under, not knowing there was a rational to explain the downturn in quality of guests.
We spend hours writing accurate reviews as believing the system was fair and upright.
Now, realising it is broken, we are no longer writing reviews. In fact, we have just had all of our 200+ reviews taken down under the “authoring” clause of reviews. A Resolution specialist in Colombia has been working for two days on the reviews extraction, per orders of his supervisor. Airbnb left us no other choice after giving them several options, they chose to side with the guest...again. Airbnb has to support hosts or we are very exposed to these bad guests. Reviews use to be our armor. Now, we have no protection and most users know this, hence their crumby behavior and actions. We will be moving to our own system of filtering and a monetary penalty model for rules, cleanliness and communication. Has anyone had their own success on filtering guests? Would appreciate hearing your experience. Maybe we can solve the problem together.
Any success on alternatives? VRBO? FlipKey? Lodgify? HipCamp?
I suspect this post will be taken down/censored as well. Another nail toward our pending dystopian society.
LB
