Last month of peak season. Booked solid. The cleaning cast member reports “smelly water” coming out of the wall, out on the patio where the guests just left from their morning smoke. The smell is unmistakable:
Sewage.
Thankfully, we use slack. I take a photo, put out the urgent call to my office manager, who’s off property for the morning.
“Got it” comes back as a reply.
Two hours later, my key team members are on site. Plumbers are making that face that you never want to see.
“This is big.”
We have a collapsed sewage pipe that is probably 90 years old, at the back of our private casita, at the rear of the property. That somehow has also caused the pipe that must connect inside the wall at the patio, to start leaking.
We ask if there is a remedial fix, to get the guests, who just arrived the day before, for a week, through their stay. This is peak season. Other spaces, let alone equivalent ones, will be hard to find. The plumbers try to work a bit of magic, until the camera guy can arrive and scope out the pipes to see how bad it is. We talk to the guests. They’re very understanding, and want to keep going. While we’re not at “normal” for the quality level of stay that we want to produce, we’re keeping fingers crossed.
The next morning, the teaching kitchen, which is part of our other company, in the main house, begins prepping pastries. Suddenly, the smell is not Swedish cinnamon rolls, but sewage stench. We look outside. The slow leak has reopened in the wall, but it’s much worse. It starts raining. Sewage heads for the pool.
We now have a crisis, and some big decisions to make quickly.
A call to the plumber tells us that we have not only major work, including tearing up concrete, brick, and walls, but that we have no way to get the current guest, or guests in the next three weeks, through this pipe failure.
My manager and I decide that we need to get our partners, Airbnb, on board to find out what we can do for our guests. Prior to calling, we decide that we will refund the guest fully. Even though they’ve been understanding, the quality of their stay is below the level we produce.
We call Airbnb. The initial operator is overseas, and unsure of what to do. He does, thankfully, escalate us to a team that does know what to do. We explain the situation. Airbnb customer service moves our case into text form. They ask for some proof of the problem. We send them photos, and a dropbox link to a video of walking through the morning’s second failure. They approve an exemption for special circumstances for our cancellations, and cancel the guests. They contact our guests with options. They relocate our current guest. They blocked out dates so no one could book. We put in a safety pad of blocks of our own.
We, meanwhile, reach out to all of the guests for the rest of the month, apologize, and tell them to check their mail from Airbnb to get their options. We offer them some comps, to further reinforce that we would like them to come for a future stay.
The teachable moments are that calm, good communication, and having systems in place to get the kind of support service that you need, both physically, and from our Airbnb partners, took what could have been a much bigger mess, and/or caused a great deal of unhappiness on the part of the people who’ve booked, often weeks, or months in advance, and turned it into as good of a situation as you can expect.
I know that people spend a lot of their time, in the community space, venting about things that went wrong with Airbnb. Certainly, if that’s the case it gives them opportunity to improve.
I’m here to say, though, that, yesterday, they were great partners, in the middle of an awful day in our business, and that they did right by us.
Thank you, Airbnb.
Brian Ross
