It's a slow season, and with it comes lower-priced guests. With lower-priced guests, as you guessed, come more issues. Recently, we've had many complaints about bed bugs. Interestingly, these complaints are always from very cheap, 1-2 day reservations, and none of the other guests before or after report anything. We send pest control every time, but they never find anything. Yet, Airbnb support (who often don’t read our reports) delists our listings without relisting them. Guests motivation to do this is obviously get a free stay.
We are a larger company with a $50 million real estate portfolio, a direct booking website, and partnerships with other OTAs, so this doesn’t affect us much. But I can't imagine what small hosts who rely on the platform are going through. I understand that Airbnb is now a publicly traded company, trying to cut costs, but I don’t understand why they continue hiring the worst third-party companies that underpay customer support reps. Two cases of mine were shut down in a row without the support agents even reading the issues. I assume their pay is tied to case counts, so they just close cases quickly.
I predict that this will seriously hurt Airbnb in the long run. The worst part is there’s no one to complain to now that Catherine Powell, the Head of Hosting, has left.
