We’ve been super hosts for a decade or more so we’re very familiar with how the platform operates. In the past 3 weeks, we’ve had the following happen twice —
In the first instance, one of our calendars was suddenly blocked with an 8 night reservation for the July 4th holiday for which no booking request had been received. None of our properties is set to accept instant bookings. The calendar block could not be altered. We called AIRBNB, and rep after rep failed to understand the issue. They kept saying things like, “Once the guest’s payment method is confirmed, you’ll receive the request,” or “We always block the calendar until you accept or decline.” Hours and hours spent explaining that we cannot accept or decline a request we never receive, and even when there’s a pending request, it does not show as a blocked reservation on calendar (this was not the dotted line pending type, it was a hard reservation block). Then we were advised that, “It’s up to the guest to decide if he wants to withdraw the request.” Sigh. It took 6 calls to find a rep willing to reach out to the traveller to determine status and willingness to withdraw this (phantom) request. When they finally took the action and reached him (a week and a half later), he informed Airbnb that he had issued no such request. Airbnb reps advised that they have no power/ability to remove an errant reservation block —really? — and the case was sent to engineers for resolution. More calls, more waiting. Finally resolved/removed.
Flash forward, and today the same thing happened all over again, except we did get an item in our inbox from the traveller. This was not a booking request — no option to accept/decline, and it also was not shown as an inquiry, it simply said “Awaiting ID.” The message from the woman made clear her understanding that the booking was set, pending the ID. So we jumped to the calendar, and once again, it was blocked with a reservation for this woman, this time for 2 1/2 months. Immediately called AIRBNB, same ordeal, instead of taking our word and escalating our report, we’re kept holding while reps “investigate” only to come back and inform us that this is how the system works, that we’d receive the request once the ID is uploaded, etc. Meanwhile, there’s a hard block 2 1/2 months long, preventing us from renting to anyone else.
Fortunately, this traveller was attentive and complied when we asked her to withdraw any booking request she had made, and she did so, and our calendar was then cleared of the errant/phantom reservation in short order.
While we don’t know exactly what is happening and why — is it a bug, a back door for agencies, is it fraudsters??— we do know this is not ‘normal’ system behavior, and we can’t continue to lose rental income and spend hours and hours seeking AIRBNB’s support to get these issues resolved. We need the problem escalated and dealt with ASAP. And we need to be believed, as anyone who has worked with this platform for years, knows what, and what not, to expect.
Has this happened recently or ever, to other hosts? Would someone inside please get this serious problem the immediate attention it requires? Thanks for anything anyone can offer here.
As an aside — AIRBNB support has all but come apart as of late. It’s always required persistence and repeat calling until you get a knowledgeable rep, but it’s been severely deprecated service and support as of late. Worse than ever, from where we sit.
