The following is the letter I plan on mailing to Brian Chesky and Airbnb upper management via a contact who has promised to pass it along. Tell me what you think all. Yeah, I know it's got a mean tone, but I don't know how I could honestly write AirBnB a letter in any other tone at this point. Sigh...
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To Whom It May Concern:
I have been with Airbnb since roughly March 2016. I started as a guest and had roughly 20 stays. While I was working another job in California I was looking for a great idea to take home with me when my temporary job ended, and thought running an Airbnb would be a great plan.
I saved my money, went back home and started studying the area for the perfect place to launch my airbnb. I spent 3 months looking at different properties, and finally settled on one just 10 minutes from the world’s #1 rated beach, Siesta Key, in Sarasota, FL.
I hosted over 700 guest stays over the next year and a half. I hosted guests from all over the world, from every demographic you could imagine. In a short year and a half, I easily have that “I’ve seen it all feeling.” For the most part, this was (or at least started out) as a good experience. The overwhelming majority of guests are clean, communicate well, and are very polite and considerate. Guests are easily not the primary concern I am writing you about today.
If I had to sum up what I think the problem with Airbnb is, in one sentence, it would be the following: You have ridiculously unrealistic, excessive, and idealized expectations for a booking service. There, I said it. My understanding is that at some point Brian Chesky said in one of the Host Q&As is that Airbnb’s mission is to accept everyone, or something like that. At first I assumed that he meant ‘all demographics,’ which I found totally acceptable. It soon became apparent to myself and many other hosts that what he meant was literally to accept everyone. This expectation is ground zero for the overwhelming majority of the problems you have as a company.
The absolute truth of human history is that human beings are not perfect. They make mistakes. They hold different beliefs, and even different levels of commitment to their own beliefs. I have no problem with any demographic; you could be straight, gay, black, white, American, from any other country, Republican, Democrat, any of the above, I have accepted them all as guests of my own free will and will continue to do so. That being said, I also have no problem declaring affirmatively: some people (individuals) just make bad house guests, and Airbnb will need to stop catering to these guests to survive.
Even though the overwhelming majority of guests are excellent from top to bottom, Airbnb seems to go out of its way to try and retain all guests. I honestly cannot understand this decision. Some business owners would give away their right foot for the ability to weed out bad customers and only keep the good ones. Airbnb has the ability to do this, and keeps fighting its own review system and guidelines to keep these poor mannered guests. From what I can tell having accepted guests with less than perfect reviews in the past, is these guests are not likely to change their stripes, and are passed from host to host frustrating one after the other until enough bad reviews ‘stick’ to keep them from getting bookings (I say until enough reviews stick because CS clearly removes them whenever a guest complains, no matter how much proof is provided to CS).
It seems, from my own experience and reading through the forums, that Airbnb is spending a lot more time, money, and resources on problem resolution than they would like, and still not managing to leave hosts satisfied with the current state of affairs. This is wild both because it’s not producing any results of value, and because it really isn’t appropriate or even necessary. This is especially wild because it’s not in any way what Airbnb is claiming to offer: a booking service. With the amount of decision making Airbnb does on a daily basis for all its hosts, I have no idea how you manage to keep us qualified as independent contractors. This is where a ton of your host rage is now being generated. You are constantly rolling out policies that the overwhelming majority of hosts are uninterested in, or even opposed to. This includes, but is not limited to, putting IB listings at the top of search results, changing cancellation polices, not backing stated cancellation policies, and especially not backing hosts on house rule violations. There is literally NO recourse when a guest agrees to and then breaks house rules. There is no fine, they get to cancel for free (regardless of cancellation policy), CS takes as long as 48 hours to cancel them if a cancellation is needed, then they often don’t even get a negative review so next host has to deal with the same issues.
These issues would be bad enough if you could call in to CS and get a resolution in a decent time frame, but then contacting CS makes it all just So. Much. Worse. I have on multiple occasions caught agents boldly and obviously lying, I have been promised contacts with no contact, I have been promised a resolution for this cancellation issue, all these promises were Bold. Faced. Lies. I am not exaggerating here, this is important: The CS reps boldly lie in an attempt to get off the phone or get a case closed. They often enrich their voices with emotion and go out of their way to sound caring, but are never actually caring or concerned. For the love of God, verify this. I recently spoke with an operations manager, Joy, at one of the call centers. Took at least 10 – 20 customer service contact attempts to get to her. Please please please, pull up the return call and listen! She was supposed to find out what was going on with a complaint I have and call me back the same day. When she did call back, it was to inform me legal was handling case, and it was out of her hands. Listen to the absolute smugness in her voice, a large change from earlier conversation. I would bet my hat her conversation with legal led her to believe I would not be in a good spot with them, and she was filled with happiness as she told me she wouldn’t be offering any help or resolution. Why?
Please, someone do their job and read the forum complaints. One after another are filled with complaints of the CS department being full of Virtue Signaling and in no way offering any real assistance to anyone. The same themes are present over and over: Airbnb called me all sweetly asking me to refund a customer against my cancellation policy. Over and over, you can read complaints of emotional manipulation, pressuring, and bullying coming out of your CS department. It’s wild.
As a host, I thought I was starting a project where I was self-employed, but it’s hard to justify that line of thought at this point. I am NEVER the decision maker when it comes to my cancellation policy, no matter which one I choose. I am constantly pressured to act in the best interested of Airbnb, instead of the best interest of myself or my guests. Airbnb dictates which guests I should take (all of them) and whether or not I receive any payout at all. Airbnb has very specific standards I have to meet on a daily basis to even stay listed, so it is Airbnb, not guests, who decide if I am a good enough listing. I tried to take a vacation this last month for the first time in years, and Airbnb cancelled my vacation so I could host more guests for free (zero exaggeration). In short, the only reason I don’t feel like an employee of Airbnb is because I feel more like a slave.
Please Brian Chesky, make the hard decisions. If you are just a listing service, please step back and be a listing service as promised, and let our BNBs survive or die by their reviews. Getting involved like an over-active parent on every listing and stay is not feasible and not even wanted. When hosts don’t want to take certain guests, respect that. When guests agree to house rules and then break them, let them go back to hotels, they won’t die, they’ll be ok. It is NOT hard to read and follow house rules, in over 20 stays I never once lost a gold star as a guest. It’s not hard, it just requires the tiniest bit of concern for other people. When people don’t display this tiny amount of basic humanity, please do not burden us with them further. Let them get their bad review and be gone. Please, I cannot be a human being with standards and offer those standards to other guests if Airbnb does not respect those standards to begin with.
All emotional pleas aside, please do the following:
#1 Do not ask us for our feedback if you have no intention of honoring it. When you changed the instant book listings to be the only ones in initial search results, pushing IB, when you changed minimum requirements for a listing, when you changed the cancellation policy recently, you asked us how we felt about it. Overwhelmingly we SCREAMED IN YOUR FACE THAT IT WAS UNNACCEPTABLE, and you still ignored us. This is #1 because it’s a total slap to the face, and you really need to work on generally not slapping us in the face.
#2 Stop emotionally slapping us in the face. The requirements emails and messages telling us how we are doing bad and need work, they are horrid and insulting. The forum posters have told you this many times, you just choose not to listen. You do all this crazy virtue signaling, but we never see you issuing returns out of your own pocket. It’s clear this virtue signaling is exactly that and nothing else. Stop. Do we pay cleaners minimum living wage? HA!!! You don’t even make sure the hosts get minimum living wage, let alone the people who work for them, step back.
#3 Fire the head of customer service, get entirely new CS contract and agents, ideally local ones to each country. The insane amount of lying and twistiness in CS department could only come from the top down. There is no way your current CS top executive will let your company survive, no way, you can quote me. While you’re at it, get rid of Standing with Giants. They are all flower talk and zero grit, it’s obvious they think we are all flaming idiots that can be easily emotionally manipulated. It’s also disgusting that you would publicly work with a company that obviously deals primarily in emo manipulation. It’s obvious, again, that you’re choosing Virtue Signaling over Getting Things Done or Real Ethics.
#4 According to you, cancellations are rare and should be handled ‘fairly’ by giving guests refunds for almost any reason. I actually have zero problem with this, provided those refunds come out of your pocket. Every time. Wait, you don’t want to pay for every refund request from every guest that tries to claim a refund? Yeah, us neither you hypocrites! Anytime you catch yourself waxing on all poetic about fairness, goodness, and manners, please make sure your wallet is the first one open to make all parties happy to ensure you are not GIGANTIC LYING HYPOCRITES. I am a single human being, not a multibillion dollar corporation, I cannot afford your mission to save the world, I’m just trying to cut out my own small piece. This, or respect the policy decisions of your hosts.
#5 Step back and be the booking company you claim to be, not judge, jury, and executioner of all CS calls. You don’t have the resources, hosts don’t have the patience. Each listing is filled with pictures, words, and most importantly, reviews. If guests cannot pick a listing they will be happy with (following the rules in the listing) they should be welcome to not use the service again, not get refunds for spaces reserved and paid for. If I cite rule violations too often, it will reflect in my reviews. If I do anything untoward at all, I can assure you, it would end up in my reviews. Let the reviews speak for themselves and stop the madness, please.
Sincerely,
Tony"
