Another update which will increase guest refund requests

[Mary419]

I’m very concerned to see this new update.

Giving a guest 72 hours to report problems instead of 24 hours is going to make the free stay scammers ecstatic. 24 hours was plenty. Why should a guest get to complain about cleanliness after staying for over 2 days?

After hosting thousands of guests I can give many examples including once when I went to re-clean a kitchen floor for a family who clearly had spilled their own takeout food sauces all over it and then told me the floor was dirty. I’m getting very worried about the future of this business when I see changes like this:

 

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Meehyun0 the only 'penalty' you will get is that if you book direct then there will be a lower number of Airbnb bookings so you may drop down the search rankings.

[Katrina314]

@Catherine-Powell 

What's the point in hosts providing feedback and/or sharing it with your "internal teams"? Every host who's been on the platform for longer than 5 minutes is well aware that's a complete waste of time and they might as well be howling at the moon. 

The reality is, YOU are Airbnb's Global Head of Hosting. You've been paid tens of millions for your role as the company's top executive in charge of hosting matters/issues, and the buck stops with YOU. 

Popping in to post a single disingenuous throwaway comment on a thread where hosts are expressing their deep frustration, disappointment, anger and disgust with what they clearly see as yet another brutal betrayal by the upper echelons of Airbnb (of which you are a key player), is a slap in the face and a complete insult to every host who has gone to the trouble of sharing their concerns here. 

It's YOUR responsibility to answer each and every question that has been asked on this thread, and to clarify the (many) points of confusion and contention regarding the updated terms/policies, which have been created as a direct result of Airbnb's typically vague, ambiguous terminology. Please make the time to do so at your earliest convenience as *not* to do so is simply unacceptable, and a wilful dereliction of your duty to the millions of hosts you purport to represent.

[Katrina314]

@Catherine-Powell 

Also, can you please comment on the following statement, issued by an Airbnb spokesperson in response to media requests...

“The decision to update our rebooking and refund policy to allow guests up to 72 hours from discovery to report travel issues is part of our ongoing work to deliver great support to our community of hosts and guests. For guests, this will provide greater flexibility to report any issues that arise during their stay. For hosts and guests, we hope a longer reporting window will provide more time for the host to work with guests to address any issues before we get involved. Similar to how we extended the window in which hosts can submit reimbursements requests, we believe these updates help build trust.”

[Mark116]

@Katrina314 @Catherine-Powell 

I hate to say it, but that statement comes very close to being a lie. 

Unless I'm mistaken the host is given ONE HOUR to respond to any travel issue complaint by the guest.  If the host happens to be away from the phone/computer, asleep or whatever, and isn't able to reply within 60 minutes, Airbnb is ready to step in, give full refunds and charge hosts the costs of resettlement in a different, more expensive location.

But, perhaps I'm not understanding the rules correctly.

ETA, this does not at all build trust, it creates, from the start, an adversarial relationship between guests and hosts, forces hosts to continue to take more and more precautions, write more rules, more caveats, pester guests with constant 'how's it going message' as another form of self protection.  I already do all of these things...take phone video before each stay, send a message the day or the next day confirming the guests have settled in and asking if they need anything.  But, apparently, god forbid, someone finds a bug in the house while I'm not available for an hour, and that's the end of hosting.  Truly, if the host committe had any input into these rules, you have chosen them very poorly.

It also provides a roadmap for unscrupulous guests to get free stays of 3 days or more.  Three days is a long time to create evidence of an issue, that may or may not have existed upon checking in.  Not all hosts document the state of their properties before guests arrive, and in such a case, the host would have zero way to prove that the 'travel issue' was something manufactured by the guests.

[Meehyun0]

I’m a superhost and I’m declining more and more guests now. Aircover seems like it is useless after last my two Aircover claims/ incidents.  After two months it still has not been resolved.  They claim they should be resolved within two weeks!  

As hosts we provide all the risk and Airbnb said we could trust them because of Aircover, but now I have experienced enough of the run around that Aircover really is a mirage.  No Aircover, No hosts, no Airbnb. 

[Sharon1428]

It means they can stay free

[Victoria-And-Todd0]

how is reporting an "issue" on 71st hour of stay will allow a host to "to work with guests to address any issues". Just the opposite - guests should report any issue in the very beginning of that stay so that host can jump to correct it. This is nothing but demagoguery disguising shafting's of the hosts. 

[Sharon1428]

sarcasm: they need to report it after they have stayed for three nights! ...that it is dirty or something!  or something broke (by them)

[Renee291]

This happened to me recently.  Guest happy during the stay then in the review, dinged me for early morning noise from planes from an airport 6 miles away, across a large river in another state. Didn't say anything about it during her 2 day stay.  In almost 3 years, no other guest has ever complained, and it's completely out of my control. Airplane noise level is affected by wind, cloud cover and many other things.  But out of 97 reviews with a 5 star rating, that 1 review dropped me to 4.9 stars. 

[Amanda1983]

This opened up the window for scammers and IF it was written this way it would have been received much better. However no one in hotels in homes anywhere gets 72 hours to find/ locate an issue what it should say is they have 12 hours to find an issue and the host has 48hrs after notification to resolves this! 

[AZ-Housing0]

How is this supposed to help to report the issue? Doesn't make any sense. I am just curious who and most importantly how came up with this idea. Obviously it was a person who never hosted a single reservation and most probably never stayed in airbnb.

[Sarah977]

@Catherine-Powell  

"Appreciating" and "sharing" are absolutely useless to hosts. And your patronizing, placating responses are offensive.

What have you actually done to make things better for hosts since you got hired on? Can you name one thing? I'd really like to know.

[Loretta126]

@Catherine-Powell @Emilie 

How do hosts with homes that fundamentally do not live up to five-star hotel in New York City standards protect themselves?  For instance, many homes in the Caribbean are "open air" and not sealed (think of this as glamping).   Because of the design, it's impossible to completely keep out "pests" (insects, geckos, sugar ants, tree frogs, etc.) and the breezes bring in dust.  

How do hosts protect themselves from a guest complaining about these issues and the CS agent granting a huge refund?  It can be in the listing but we all know guests (and CS agents do not read).

[Mary419]

@Beverly56 @Loretta126 Waiting to hear the answer to your concerns myself. Airbnb set themselves apart initially (to those owners who were already comfortable with the major V word competitor) by giving weird categories of listing and a lot of room to write all the quirks... it felt at first like a place we could list a cabin without central air conditioning and get college age backpacker types who would appreciate adventure style accommodations. Obviously there were tree houses, tents and Yurts and igloos at least that is what the publicity indicated. So it felt like a great platform if your place was NOT cookie cutter. This aspect is what lured me here in the first place. 

Now they have phone agents issuing full refunds + a penalty charge + a scolding + a threat to hosts have one single insect make a cameo in their otherwise pristine listing.

Now they clearly want their listings to all be professional cookie cutter style places all of a sudden. Maybe these new rules are designed to drive hosts that don't offer that away?? I honestly have no idea who is making these decisions or why. I do know a huge bulk of listings filling this platform now are condo-tel style places run by mega firms where a refund is merely a blip on a spreadsheet.... a tiny nothing drop in the bucket or out of the bucket of a vulture fund. As opposed to the loss being a huge insult and even heartbreak like it is to most of us bothering to write on this board. 

I always remember some friends of mine here in Georgia had a great guest house at their multi million dollar waterfront mansion and rented it via Airbnb part time. They did this for a year enjoying the money and also the social aspect. They shut the whole thing down due to a guest freaking out complaining over a palmetto bug in the house.... and my friends never stopped telling people about that. It was so disheartening to them because they knew their place was clean and amazing and they knew this bug was not a fault of theirs. And they never offered their place on Airbnb again. 

[Sarah977]

@Mary419  "Now they clearly want their listings to all be professional cookie cutter style places all of a sudden. Maybe these new rules are designed to drive hosts that don't offer that away?? "

It sure seems like that. And they definitely let those big players get away with all kinds of things they don't let regular hosts get away with. You can also pay to have your listings get high search ranking, did you know that? So those big corporate players are now not only crowding out real, traditional listings, they can crowd you out even more by paying to do so.

I also think Airbnb would prefer to get rid of long time hosts who are hip to their game and criticize a lot of their host-unfriendly policies. They'd prefer newbie, starry-eyed hosts who fall for all the rhetoric and think Air Cover will pay for the $5000 of damages the 50 partiers did to their home, who they never got a chance to vet because Airbnb scared them into thinking if they didn't agree to use Instant Book, they wouldn't get any bookings.