Unhappy memory

[Tony134]

My favorite memories with Airbnb are all with customer service!  I think this latest interaction with them was THE BEST!

One of the guests brought me fleas recently!  How kind of them!  When I hit up AIrbnb for the first time in over 1,000 guest stays to make an insurance claim, airbnb reps told me those fleas could have come from anywhere, even magic, and there was no way to prove it, so no way to make an insurance claim!  They even helped the guest who brought the fleas cancel and go elsewhere (on network) and did not provide me resources for either getting out the fleas/paying for treatment nor did they reimburse me for keeping the house unbooked for a week or two while fleas die off(because I used everything possible and have no pets, they are dying, but it's not Instant).

Brian Chesky, you're the best!

*[Post moved to create new topic – title updated]

[Robin4]

It's a shame that there will always be someone who will 'rain on your parade'! There is always that one person who will turn a nice occasion into a sour one!

This thread was started off with the best of intentions, to conjur up some nice memories from hosting over the past decade.......and then along comes @Tony134 with something that could have been aired on any one of a hundred other threads here....but no, he chose this one....oh well....so be it! Hopefully the moderators will remove Tony's post and put it on some other more deserving thread.

To get back to where this thread should be.....sheeeeee, at times you do have to wonder!!

I once hosted a couple who booked here for a long weekend. I knew it was some sort of celebration but prior to them arriving, we did not know what the celebration was.  The husband volunteered that it was his wifes birthday, so on the day I made a birthday cake and engineered it so that they would have a few drinks and nibbles with us around sunset. It was a lovely warm night and as it got dark I lit a mass of candles and bud lights around the garden and produced the birthday cake. We all sang happy birthday and she cried, and it was a moment in my hosting that I will always remember....we had a lovely evening and shared a special night with perfect strangers!

Isn't that what hosting is all about, bringing strangers together!

Cheers.....Rob

[Tony134]

Personally, I think it's a shame how quickly a few nice words will convince people to participate in Gaslighting.  This thread was not created with the best intentions.  It was created by a paid employee to drum up positive feelings tied to Airbnb experiences.  It's something Airbnb and their pr company do all the time: try to play on people's inner decency to manipulate them emotionally, often into becoming some kind of free or underpaid employee.  My complaints with Airbnb are 100% valid, and can be read echo'd up and down across this forum, in thousands of posts, just like you said.  This same PR team, led by Lizzie, constantly operates without integrity.  They ask questions about how Airbnb can improve or what we think about upcoming policy changes, then ignore literally everything we say, sometimes hundreds of posters in a row one after the other, to go ahead and do exactly what they originally planned anyway.  I LOVE.  LOVE. how when CS teams calls to 'resolve' a dispute, they always start by asking permission to refund your money, and then when you say no all of a sudden they aren't asking anymore.  Like the Mafia.

Personally, I would LOVE to not be airing my dirty laundry with Airbnb in public forum, but this is literally exactly the way they want it.  They provide zero access to real support through the CS team.  Zero. There is no way to talk to a regular decision making employee.  They have only people an ocean away trained to refund your money to 'make things easy.'

Airbnb and Brian Chesky are big boys and girls, they can speak for themselves.  Again, I've accepted well over 1,000 guests from Airbnb network, I've had them send me nationally recognized cult leaders and notorious criminals with their own wikipedia pages for murder and kidnapping.  They do zero background check.  They are responsible for nothing.  Any time Brian Chesky or any exec who claim they have a modicum of human decency want's to reach out and have a normal conversation over a phone or face to face, they know where to find me, but this is, again, literally the way they prefer it.  Insanity, but not of my doing.

Cheers. /S

[Tony134]

Level 10 in forum, hosted over 1,000 stays on Airbnb, lived on airbnb as guest for over a year.  Amount of times Lizzie has responded to any prompts I've sent her way to actually discuss anything:

ZERO.

[Lizzie]

Hello @Tony134,

I hope you don't mind, as there was getting quite a bit of conversation on this, I thought it might be best to make it into a new topic. 

I am so sorry to hear your feelings towards Airbnb regarding your recent experience and in general, I have always valued hearing your input in our conversations here in the CC over the years. Your feedback along with your fellow community member's here, is always taken seriously by myself and as I have mentioned here in the CC before, I spend a lot of time each week compiling feedback and making sure this reaches the different teams within Airbnb. Hopefully through the topics in Airbnb Updates board you will see that Community feedback is being listened to, but as you can imagine it does take time. 

To add, I feel awful that I have missed some specific prompts you have sent me, were these by DM or publicly? 

Thank you also for sharing your thoughts on me here and my posts. I have also receieve other feedback from a couple of other CC members recently, which is always useful. My aim with anything I post here, is to create discussion which I hope you will find interesting, they are usually based on interesting things I have seen here in the CC. 

To provide you with a little more information on my thinking behind the original post that you shared your comments here in. This was purely to mark the 10 year anniversary of Airbnb. I personally think this is a pretty big milestone and as a community here, we are ultimately talking here, because we all share a common interest in Airbnb and so I thought it would be a nice talking point. We see a wide range of feedback shared here in the CC and it is here for the you and others to find support and share experiences, but this also includes positive ones as well as more negative ones. I believe that everyone here has some great memories to share and I believe we can do both of this here in the CC. With hosting over 1000 guests, I really hope you have a more positive one as well.

This is certainly doesn't take away your recent experience.  I want you to also know that I did pass your feedback regarding your experience mentioned here on to our Support Team. I do hope this got resolved and you were happy with the outcome in the end. 

I hope to speak with you more on this.

Thanks,

Lizzie

(@Robin4 for reference)

[Lizzie]

P.S - @Tony134, let me know if you would prefer a different title and I can update it. 🙂