How is your Vivint Smart Home Experience?

[Tey-and-Rob0]

I accepted the offer. The deal is free equipment (Camera doorbell, Element Thermostat, a few door censors and best of all a wireless door lock that will automatically coordinate with your Airbnb guest by giving them a code that works only during their stay) free installation & 1 free trial membership year of service as long as I agree to take the Vivint surveys .
I also use my own website. I called and asked "will I be able to include guest that book outside of Airbnb?", the extremely polite and professional C/S agent assured me that I can add my non-Airbnb guest into the system and it will function just like the Airbnb auto coding. No, it doesn't.....
You can add, but cannot designate it for a particular time period, once the guest leave, you have to go in and delete them as a user.

When the super nice installer showed up on time, he asked where we would like the main panel installed, we chose a room guest do not have access to. He got right to it and had it installed in no time, then the doorbell, the thermostat, the motion detector, and the door censors. THEN he asked were the original doorbell was. We told him, he started taking it apart. I asked (out of curiosity) what was he doing. He said " oh, the doorbell sound can only come out of the main panel. But your guest should be able to hear it, it's pretty loud" The guest cannot hear it, we have scheduled an appointment to have it moved. I'll get to that appointment in a bit.
The next day our guest arrived. We are not on premises when guest rent the home. They have the house to their own. A few minutes later I get a call from the guest that the AC isn't working. The installer hooked everything up but did not run any test to make sure it worked. When you turn the AC on it blows the heater. I drove back to the house and spoke to Vivint's customer service for about an hour trying to fix it through tech support. By now the guest are hot and mad, too hot in the house to cook, we gave them$100 to go get a bit to eat. The issues hasn't been fixed and Vivint gave me a 8 day service call.... 8 days before someone would come and fix it.

We finally got a friend to come and put our original thermostat back on. Now, two days into our guest not having AC they have asked for a refund of those two days. That's around $800.00.
Ok, so now I'm out $900.00, I told customer service. The agent told me that the can OFFER me a credit for the down time. Now let's think about that... Let's say I was paying the $51.00 a month that would be a $13.yo credit............ Or maybe he meant he would give me 8 extra days of free trial.

Nevertheless, back to the appointment. I had to change the appointment because of other guest coming and going. So the appointment is 3 WEEKs out. They didn't have any appoints on the days I don't have guest until this date, again 21 days out.

Now, while waiting for this appointment, the doorbell camera when the "offline" (3 days after install). I had to drive back to the house and fix it at the panel..... I'm about an hour away right now. What I'm I to do when I'm 8 hours away? Through CS we were able to get the doorbell back on line, remember it's only good for a camera right now, guest can't hear the doorbell. We put a note on the down to knock until further notice.

Yesterday, I manually entered our new guest coming in as a user. There is a digital button you have to tap either on the main panel or the mobile app when creating a new user to give the guest access to use a code to open the wireless keyless lock. The digital button no longer works. I had to give our guest the house keepers code.

I called CS. Guess what? I have to be at the panel to fix it.... Maybe tomorrow.....

Three things to think about if you chose to accept this offer.
1. Though it may seem like a collaboration with Airbnb, I called them to see about escalating the appointment. Airbnb basically said not their issue call Vivint.
2. Give yourself a month without guest to work out the bugs.
3. If, the issues persist, you have to be onsite to fix them.... Nothing seems to be fixable remotely....

I would love to hear from anyone on your experience and how the equipment is working for you.

[Alice-and-Jeff0]

This sounds like a nightmare and I'm so sorry you're going through this experience with a company that Airbnb is sponsoring.  

We've had security systems in our homes for years and this sounds like the same experience but with a different vendor.  They lure you in with the "free equipment" which is never enough to fully protect your home - thus adding on more stuff and costs - and then not being able to correctly get things set up so you aren't calling them out over and over. Then every time there is a problem, it takes days, sometimes weeks, to get someone out to correct the problem.  We've had Brinks, ADT, and now we have Front Point.  Front Point has been the easiest since it's a "self-install".  Our only complaint, the mounting tape used for the sensors fails and we are forced to reinstall the sensor with new tape (COME ON, in this day an age, this is just a cheap product).  Front Point has added a number of features like the ones Vivint has, so if you can't get them to sort it out and make you whole, you have the option to move to a different company.  

Good luck.  

[Tey-and-Rob0]

Thank you,
I'll post as details develop.
It's frustrating now, hopefully the "kinks" get workout. Thanks for your comments.

[Kyle36]

I took the Vivint deal, and I am regretting it. Free has become very expensive at this point. I plan to write a letter to AirBnB. Vivint just is not structured for success and the experience is tarnishing the AirBnB brand in my opinion.

[Tey-and-Rob0]

Update:  Vivint has pretty much bent-over-backwards to correct the issues I have. I must say it has been impressive, the amount of customer  service and following through is (in my opinion) the very best I every recall receiving.

[Bobby20]

Has all of your issues been resolved? I am considering having their equipment installed.

TIA!

[Tey-and-Rob0]

Yes

[Debbie-And-Joel0]

I installed Vivint in a small 2 bedroom/1 bath house a few months ago.  Just got it listed on AirBnB a couple weeks ago.  I LOVE the Vivint/AirBnb interface.  So far it is working like a charm.  I love that unique codes go to each guest and that the code is good only from checkin to checkout.  I love being able to adjust the thermostat remotely from my phone.  I love the doorbell camera.  The whole thing is fabulous.

About 10 days ago, I scheduled installation at my primary residence (where I have 2 bedrooms listed on AirBnB) and in a guest house on the same property.  All went fine until the installers attempted to link these 2 new door locks to my AirBnB account.  They tried repeatedly to make this work to no avail.  The problem seemed to be that each door lock (I was to have 3 in total) needed a unique Vivint account (which we could accomodate by use of 3 separate email addresses) and needed a unique AirBnB account - that is, Vivint could not seem to penetrate one AirBnB account and access separate AirBnB listings.  The installers were at my home for 10 hours, doing all they could to make things work.  Once we figured out it was NOT going to work, I told them to cancel the installation.  I did not want to pay a monthly service fee if there would be no interface between Vivint and AirBnB.  They took the equipment out, leaving holes in my walls.  The worst of all was that during their attempts to make the interface work, all my bookings in my primary residence/guest house received emails with codes to the lock at my separate investment property (the one I described in the first paragraph of this post) - 5 different times!  AND, the current guest in that investment property had his code erased so that he was locked out of the house.  This was an unmitigated disaster!

My experience is that one listing and one Vivint door lock works great.  Do not attempt to use Vivint on multiple listings until they get their act together.

[Kari46]

As of today, we cannot get ViVint to connect to our AirBnB account and must do the codes maually. This has been going on since December of 2017 - right after they did an update. We have one AirBnB and are about to have another. We are seriously looking for another solution - does any one have one?

[Andrew719]

Apparently Vivint has a bug in their system, so that if your Airbnb/Vivint accounts get disconnected for whatever reason, they will not able to reconnect them. They are working on a solution but don't have a timeline for completion.

My experience with Vivint hasn't been terrible (but not perfect by a long shot). They put together the things that are important to me:

- Keypad/smart lock that isn't WiFi dependant

- Auto generate guest codes

- Auto communicate codes to guests

- Monitored smoke alarm

- Monitored burglar alarm when guests are not using the unit

However, if it doesn't work what's the point? They have great customer service, but I get the sense that their Airbnb integration is a low  priority for them. 

I'm looking into alternatives as well. Suggestions welcome. 

[Mark-and-Marcelo0]

That's odd. We've had Vivint since 03/2017 and never had a problem with anything, except for the main panel that had a hardware issue.  Our main reason for hiring Vivint was the autogeneration of the codes, great feature that is going to be discontinued 09/12/18. 

[Mark-and-Marcelo0]

We've had a great experience with Vivint since the day we got it. It has always worked, the process is easy, straightforward, and efficient. However, we learned today that Vivint will no longer set up the codes for the Airbnb guests. It is very disappointing. 

This is part of the email: "As of September 12, 2018, Vivint will no longer be exchanging reservation data with Airbnb. This change means that we will no longer automatically generate PIN codes on your behalf for your guests, and you and your guests will no longer receive Airbnb-related emails from us."

It ends with a suggestion on how to set up users and assign codes, but that's the least of our worries. 

Next, a call to Vivint to see how this affects the promotional rate they gave us when we set up the system.

[Andrew719]

UPDATE: Vivint now has a known issue with creating new users/pins from a desktop or mobile device. 

So now, not only does it not integrate with Airbnb, but you can't even make pins or users remotely? 

My experience with them has been ok, but this is a huge disappointment for me. I had a couple locked out at 11pm last night; I'd created them as users and gave them a pin, but Vivint didn't save it (that's the bug...you can't save new users/pins). I think this is a deal breaker for me...