@Sarah977
Sorry if I am covering old ground Sarah, being away for a while means I have missed a lot here on the CC but, if this is old news and it is still happening, that alarms me! We are the ones who have to deal with the problems these issues create and when they are not of our doing and remain unfixed....that is just unacceptable.
Sarah these little surprises keep happening all the time!
The other day while away I received a message on my phone app....
Jason's (not his real name) booking has been cancelled 16th to 22nd April.
That was it, no other information and no message stream to precede it!!!
My reaction was 'how can a booking I do not have be cancelled??'
The next thing I get a message from Jason........,
Apparently it took 'Jason' and Airbnb longer than the allocated 12 hours to get that verification sorted out and the booking simply lapsed as a 'cancelled reservation' !!
Now, as you know Sarah, a year or two ago a booking would come through to us along with an admin message ..."This guest has 24 hours to complete their verification, the dates will remain blocked on your calendar until the guests account has been verified" .......fine, we all knew where we stood.
Now, it's just a bloody shambles, Airbnb choose to say nothing to the host and give the guest 12 hours to verify their account before calling it a booking and in that 12 hours another booking can slide in and steal the guests required dates, which is what happened to this guest of mine.
Can you possibly think of anything more stupid than that Sarah? I contacted CX and they have confirmed that what I have described here is now the way booking verifications are handled.
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Sarah I have been pleased to give @Catherine-Powell time to settle into what is a taxing role with many complex issue but, we are going to need to see some results soon. Catherine has been with the company for a year now and I am concerned that these issues that so frustrate us seem to be on the rise rather than being tackled. Short term renting is not just a PR exercise, it is a difficult job, we hosts are the ones with our heads on the chopping block all the time, day after day, and we cannot simply offer our guests a few soothing words which will make us look good and have their problems disappear.
Both of the instances I have detailed here in this thread have happened to me in the past week! But, a look at my activity log to CX will show that 02 85203333 is one of the most used numbers on my mobile phone. Week after week I am trying to sort our problems that I didn't create.....Airbnb did, and the time has really come for decent cohesive action to stop this continual unheralded avalanche of platform glitches.
Our jobs are hard enough as it is and a PR video every now and then is just not cutting the mustard!
Cheers.......Rob