Letter to Airbnb

[Robin4]

I would ask the company to consider something.

I am never going to be able to host more than one booking per night, I do not have that corporate structure that the company’s philosophy and strategy appears to be driven towards…

I am a core host, one of the few million who got you going, and where you are today!

My desire is to welcome every guest in the best way I can, and make them feel at easy and comfortable with their decision to book, not only with me, but with Airbnb. I welcome every guest in a different way....... sometimes efficiently, sometimes with humour, sometimes as a host, sometimes as a hotelier.

I can only do this if I can see who I am dealing with. I can’t do this when I am only provided with a name. I open a conversation stream with a guest couple in their 50-60’s entirely differently than I would with a pair of friends in their early 20’s, or a young family. A photo tells me how my contact should be opened, a blank sentence does not!

A photo does not influence whether I host a guest or not, it tells me how to get this hosting off to a good start…

And surely, isn’t that what Airbnb wants?

Please allow me to do my job to the best of my ability and give me back those profile photos that I need to be able to do that!

Cheers.....Rob

[Robin4]

@Linda612 @Rebecca0 @Pete28 @Jo13

I am also going to tag @Ben in on this post 

Hi Linda, from your profile photo I agree absolutely, nobody could confuse you with Queen Elizabeth the second or Miriam Margolyse.....that is a wonderful face, all of its own!

I agree you can't judge a book by its cover but Linda we are not judging books...that is to come...... we are accepting reservation requests! I always like to get the guest onside from the start.

Let me tell you a story about getting people onside Linda....and why it is important to me!

I spent a year working in Airbnb support and a question came to my screen one day. The question was.....and I need to be a bit crude here, so please forgive me..

"How do I close my Airbnb account? I would rather give my money to the highest priced hotel than give another cent to you snowflake motherf*ckers!" 

That's a pretty heavy question to have to deal with, but Linda I took it on! I told him what he had to do to close his account and as I finished, I asked him why he was so angry, what had we done that had so offended him, I didn't know everything but if there was a chance that I could put things right I sure would like to try!

At that point he opened up. This guy was a white race supremacist! He wanted to go to Charlottesville in Virginia and protest in the race riots where that unfortunate woman was run over and killed and, Airbnb would not let him book a listing in that general area. Airbnb do have a duty of care to their hosts as well as their guests and this user was on a black list in certain situations. I spent the next twenty minutes telling him how Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister had requested that Australia should fall to the Japanese forces during World War 2 so the colonial troop could be mobilised in Europe to support the war effort for England. Britian had just lost two of it's capital ships....the Prince of Wales and the Repulse in the pacific and further losses could not be sustained. My father was in Milne Bay and Goodenough Island when the Yanks came in and they saved us and that is why Australians will always have a special place in their hearts for Americans....I buttered this guy up and made him feel so good.

This was his response.......

And guess what.....he didn't close his account, to which most people would say ....'Why did you do that?'

Put him out of that situation and he was a nice guest, had heaps of great hosts reviews.

I was proud to represent Airbnb that day!

It is always worth the effort to relate to your guest upfront in any way possible and I sincerely hope that Airbnb will have second thoughts about this annonimity thing as far as guests information is concerned.

Cheers.....Rob

[Jo13]

@Robin4

Your stories are the stuff of legend.

PLEASE write a book!

-Jo

[Robin4]

@Jo13

I did Jo, just over a decade ago. This was the promotional flyer for it.

and it did ok for a 'self published' effort. By that I mean it sold more than 2,000 copies in its first year and another 1,500 since. But it's hard to get a writing career off the ground....none of the major publishing houses want to take you on till you have a track record and a mass of effort has to go into self publishing. If I had started earlier in life I may have pursued it Jo, but where we are now, it's just too hard.

It was a big work, over 800 pages....172,000 words and 12 picture pages.

I still have it all on computer and I may re-release it in digital form again this year

Cheers.....Rob

[Jo13]

@Robin4, please do! Gosh, what a story of intrigue! I'd love to read it.

Next up, your memoir...

[Robin4]

@Jo13

I will work out how I can put a sequence from a chapter in here without taking up lots of space. It's on my computer in 'Word' form. Once I have released it electronically it will be easy but I don't have the computer knowledge to put 25 pages into a link that I can post. I think I need Ben's help!

The other thing I did a few years ago was bring out a disk of my piano music.

It's elevator stuff but it was fun doing!

A little bit of money comes in every now and then from these things and every little bit helps!

Cheers........Rob

[Jo13]

@Robin4

You can save your Word document as a PDF right in Word itself. If you upload that PDF to your Google Drive, or whichever online service you use, it you can get a download link and share it with whoever you like. I'm first in line!

-Jo

[Robin4]

@Jo,

I will play around with that, thanks Jo.

Without starting at the start and finishing at the end, trying to take individual sections out of this book is confusing.

As I said the action jumps from one character to another,  and although the passage of text I would want to post to you involves what happens on a small trading vessel off the tip of Sardinia in the Mediterranean! It takes up about 7 pages in total, and it takes place in various grabs over two chapters , so, you can understand there is cut and paste involved to keep the passage coherent!

I will see what I can do!

Cheers.....Rob

[Muslima0]

This message supports the decision not to include photos, but perhaps for unintended reasons.  The fact that a black & white photo of someone from the Middle East triggered you to think of 9/11 is an example of the bias that airbnb is attempting to address by eliminating the photos. 

[Robin4]

@Muslima0

I am sorry that you had to post that Muslima, I understand what you are saying but, as a host who loves what they do I would never under any circumstance not accept a reservation from someone from the Middle East.....or from any other ethnic area purely based on that fact!

I have hosted Musilims here and they have been wonderful guests, welcome back here at any time. 

My feeling is the mechanism has always been in place here on Airbnb to stop hosts who refuse accommodation on racial or discriminatory based grounds. And that mechanism is, the host can be reported and delisted and possibly barred from the platform. 

Muslima, not every host is perfect....they are some that I am ashamed to be associated with but, hosts like me outnumber hosts like them 1,000 to 1!

What this has done is breed mistrust where it did not exist before in the minds of many decent hosts.....

Do you think that this is a good outcome?

The reason Airbnb has done this...on any given night 2 million guests stay in an Airbnb listing but this number has plataued and by all acounts is possibly falling for a variety of reasons. In an endeavour to present a more marketable face the company is trying any way it can to stop potential bookings from not proceeding.....weed out the host declines.

But by doing this they will play right into the hands of other platforms who are prepared to pick up successful hosts and their business at the expence of Airbnb!.....

It is already happening with me!

I am so sorry you feel that way Muslima, by doing that you are doing us all a dis-service, but I wish you all the best!

Cheers.....Rob

[Muslima0]

Rob:

I am not doing a dis-service by stating facts (not my feelings) about the wide-spread discrimination against guests, which prompted studies of airbnb's hosts' practices and led airbnb to try to resolve it.  Airbnb's photo policy is an effort to address the discrimination.  I am impacted by it as a host, and hopefully will benefit from it as a guest.  

The fact is ( again, based on studies and airbnb's own findings): the previous mechanisms that you 'feel' were ok, simply were not.  That is not my 'feeling' - that is the conclusion of airbnb and independent investigators based on examination of facts.  The casual ratio you throw out ("1,000 good hosts, for every 1 bad one") is misleading:  airbnb was put on notice of discrimination after independent investigations (including an investigation by a governmental anti-discrimination body) found that discrimination was prevalent.  

By stating implicit bias exists and that it impacts people's (including hosts') decisions is a statement of fact, not my 'feeling.'  And, if people are truly interested in creating a fair, bias-free community, they will not shy away from confronting their own biases (everyone has them), and they will agree to  meaningful mechanisms that are designed to eradicate bias.  It is the reflexive denial of bias, and a refusal to be inconvenienced by mechanisms designed to eradicate bias,  that cause bias to perpetuate and flourish.

I hope this helps, Rob.

[Robin4]

@Muslima0

Ok Muslima, lets look at some statistics and I will provide the link to where these statistics come from.....

Now at 1.1% of all complaints, any person would have to consider that....there are more important issues to be addressed.

I am sorry that you may have been confronted with discrimination in your past and I wish there was some way that I could make that better....nobody deserves that but, what has happened here is Airbnb has taken to a walnut with a sledge-hammer and by doing so is going to open a can of worms and create far more issues than it solves. As I said before mechanisms were in place to these unsavoury issues. I am not condoning them Muslima, I don't want to see a 'Hydra' created here!

Oh, and here is that link.!

 https://ipropertymanagement.com/airbnb-statistics/

Cheers......Rob

[Muslima0]

My last words on this: You've confirmed my reasons for typically not engaging in these discussions. I generally like to reserve my time and energy to have discusssions with people who are at least receptive to acknowledging the existence of discrimination and its effect on communities, and who recognize their position of privilege and the responsibility that comes with that privilege.  Otherwise, these discussions useless.  

[Inna22]

@Muslima

Before I make an assumption about what you mean by privilege here, I thought I would ask you to explain

[Robin4]

@Inna22

Inna, let it go possum, discrimination comes in lots of forms. There are those who will come here to make a statement and when the answers they get do not affirm what they have said, those answers will be ridiculed.....that is also discrimination.

I am sorry that discrimination takes place on every continent on earth just as you are Inna.

I have seen my gay daughter and some of our gay guests become, or have become  the subject of discrimination in our own 'open' society here!

I can't change the world Inna, and neither can you but, we can, and do, do our bit!

I want to welcome guests...I don't give a s.h.i.t who they are, where they have come from, what their past has been, I just want them to be good guests and I want them to feel welcome....and I can only do that if I have enough information to welcome them in a way that they appreciate!

And I don't see anything wrong with that, and I certainly don't want to be lumped in with some host in Outer Mongolia who may have racially abused a guest!

Cheers.....Rob

[Jo13]

This is enlightening, thanks Rob!