To Hosts who have experienced "accidental" setting changes by Airbnb without consent

[Vanessa1275]

Hello fellow hosts.

I am a superhost and have just experienced my first "accidental" change of policy to my listing without my consent by Airbnb (please see my post 10 percent (non-refundable) discount added without my consent!) for more info. From the responses received on that post, it is clear that Airbnb is doing ongoing abhorrent business practices to hosts by changing settings automatically without any notice or consent. I find this unethical, and as partners who make their business possible I believe we should stand up for our rights as hosts. To top it all off, there is now no direct line of communication to Airbnb only via chat which goes unanswered, or if not answered by a robot with an automatic response. 

If you have ever experienced any of these "accidental" changes to your account without your consent, please share here. With these records, we need to take action! Would love to hear any thoughts or suggestions!

[Sky13]

My check in time has mysteriously changed twice in the past several months. 

[Vanessa1275]

@Sky13 Thank you for sharing! Sorry to hear automatic changes have happened to you as well. 

[Ian-And-Anne-Marie0]

@Vanessa1275 

I had my buffer dates overridden - those dates set before/after a change of guests reducing change over to same day during Covid cleaning. CS said it was allowed when it plainly wasn't. I informed the guest, they cancelled and Airbnb paid them compensation for their inconvenience. 

[Vanessa1275]

@Ian-And-Anne-Marie0 Thank you for sharing! 

[Ian-And-Anne-Marie0]

@Vanessa1275 

I would add that the guest compensation wasn’t voluntary from AirBnb. Because my settings had been overridden causing the issue and upsetting the guests’ plans, I insisted.

They initially offered the guest £19 on a £950 booking. When I checked with The guest they said what they had been “offered” and they told me “we’re not sure what we want yet”.

I assume the negotiations continued on consuming CS Agents time. 

How much of CS Agents time is consumed fixing AirBnb created problems? Look around the Community Centre posts and you will conclude that many of the problems CS are dealing with are AirBnb created problems with guest/host problems being a significantly smaller percentage.

[Emiel1]

@Vanessa1275 

Hosts with multiple listings and using "professional tools" will see at a glance the last moment a listing was changed.

It is mentioned at the end of each row. So if you see "4 hours ago" and you did not touch the specific listing, better check it.

Best regards,

Emiel

[Vanessa1275]

@Emiel1  Thank you for letting me know, I wasn't aware of this! It is still very frustrating that we as hosts have to constantly be double checking our settings instead of having trust in this platform to know that it won't be changed without our consent. I believe we are already taking on the largest risk by hosting, why do we also need to endure any more headaches like this!

[Emiel1 · Accepted solution]

@Vanessa1275 

I would like to add some more:

I  heard that hosts using a co-host have access to a recorded change-log  (reason: they then  know what each other has changed). If this is  true, maybe every host should have such a  changelog !

BTW you referred to a previous posting, please note every thread has a unique URL, so to make it more easy to find :  https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Hosting/10-percent-non-refundable-discount-added-without-my-cons...

Best regards,

Emiel

[Tony-And-Una0]

Hi Vanessa

We have a really annoying issue.

Anytime we amend any fees, such as cleaning or extra guests etc, it resets all our weekend pricing across the entire calendar to the default price. We then have to manually amend them, back to seasonal prices.

Took us quite a long time to realise what was causing it.

[Vanessa1275]

@Tony-And-Una0 Thank you for sharing! Glad to hear you found the cause, sorry to hear you have extra work to do every time. 

[Ann72]

@Vanessa1275  I have a bizarre "weekend pricing" number that is grayed out and unchangeable.  I'm about to go to the calendar and change every single instance of this pricing, but a surprise off-season booking just caught me.  Luckily I had raised the base price a few days ago, and the new price makes up for the difference, but how massively annoying.

[Susan1188]

Yes!  It keeps changing my check-in time to "flexible" - it is NOT flexible we do not do middle of night arrivals!  We meet our guests!  We need to get ID and see who's coming!  Flexible, no!

And I have also had the non-refundable option added automatically.

This lets guests get a 10% discount with no additional risk to them, because they all know they can just introduce an EC claim and they will get refunded their non-refundable booking.
I even had a guest tell me before she booked non refundable and I told her it was riskier for her:  "I'm not worried, I'll just get it cancelled by customer support."

[Inna22]

@Emiel1  why it does give you an idea of the change, you have no idea what was changed. Plus changes such as amenities or availability setting do not reflect as a change. It is only text, photos and review

[Inna22]

@Vanessa1275what is your plan? All of this has happened to me many times and they were all bugs. I am sure there is language in the contract that Airbnb is not liable. Airbnb had no problem changing terms of service without notice (Which is against contract) to be able to include pandemic. They are definitely not doing anything about something they are not liable for. I am sure they do not set out to have glitches. Every platform does. It is super annoying when this happens but aside from doing a better job at keeping us informed of known glitches, I do not know what else I can expect. I take that back. Not doing a better job, doing it period. They only way to find out about a known glitch right now is to come to this board. Even CS doesn’t know most of the time