What is the Community Center and how can I get started?

[Lizzie]

**Last updated on Jan 11th 2019, to view the new Getting Started topic, click here**

Airbnb exists to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, and at its heart is its community. The Community Center is here to enable you to come together to inspire, share knowledge and stories, and to support one another.

To help you get started, here are a few handy tips:

How to encourage community spirit

One of the best things about a community is that it brings people together. To make sure the Community Center remains a healthy and inviting space, please:

• Respect each other and show appreciation when someone shares useful content
• Remember to post full answers and stay on topic when replying to a person’s request for advice or help
• Keep an open mind and see the good in each other

For more details, take a look at our Community Center Guidelines.

What do community members talk about here?

There’s a huge variety of conversations, so to make it easier to find and explore, we have several different Discussion Rooms. If you’re looking for a specific topic, try starting with a search.

If you need to speak to Customer Service, please contact them directly on +1-415-800-5959 / +1-855-424-7262 (toll-free).

How can I contribute?

We can all contribute to the life of our community, whether you are new to hosting or have years of experience. Here are the main ways to get involved:

• Support a post: give appreciation to a comment, by clicking the thumbs up button
• Reply to a topic: click ‘Reply’ or ‘Join the Conversation’ to join the conversation on a topic
• Create a new topic: if you have a question or wish to start a new discussion, visit the relevant discussion room and click ‘Start a Conversation’
• Share your knowledge: fancy writing a Community Guide or sharing a story? These are great resources for others, so please feel free to get creative and share yours

Where to start?

Why not introduce yourself to the Community here; we’d love to hear from you.

If you have any questions or just want to say hello, feel free to message either of your Community Managers, @Lizzie or @Quincy.

We look forward to welcoming you to the community.

[Lizzie]

Hello @Andrew90,

This is fantastic. I have just added it to the master list of Community Guides, which is great to see. 

Thanks so much for highlighting this. 

It is great to hear you are keen to create other guides. In terms of the guides created by Dave also shown in Community Guides post, he creates a new post following the title format of his previous ones (so including Guide in the title is a good tip). He would then let me know that he had created this and it was posted, either in a mention or generally via DM and he would share the links with me to add to the portfolio of guides. 

Do you think this would work well for you? I am happy to speak with you further on this. 🙂

Thanks so much,

Lizzie

[Andrew90]

@Lizzie  Keeping seeing people asking about price fluctuations and I didn't feel the current help articles didn't fully adress the topic so I drafted one in response to an existing post. I'd recommend promoting this to community help guides. 

https://community.airbnb.com/t5/Community-Help/Price-mistake/m-p/206298#M19992

Andrew

[Lizzie]

Thanks so much, this is great stuff @Andrew90!

I've just sent you a DM. 

Speak to you soon. 🙂

[Tahani0]

Hi I'm new to community but had some good experience in hosting through wonderful Airbnb. My question can I do bed and breakfast offering ‏oriental middle eastern food ?? Do u advise me to do that ? Thx

[Jane171]

Insurance. if a guesst falls down my stairs say, will I be liable ?

[Lizzie]

Hello @Jane171 and @Tahani0,

Welcome to the Community Center.

These are both good questions you have asked here. As you have replied to a post in the Welcome and Announcement board, I would recommend starting a new topic in the Community Help board here in the CC, as it will make it easier for others to find your question and reply, plus for others looking for the same answer in the future.

Let me know if you need any help with this. I look forward to speaking with you around the CC. 🙂

Thanks,

Lizzie

[Jerry48]

I am Burl Wharton and I live in Pahrump, Nv which is about 60 miles from Las Vegas. I am retired and looking for something to do and chose airbnb instead of treditional rental. I am excited to be part of what is trending. I am 66 years old and trended before. lol

I don't know what to expect but glad the the company takes care of it with a awesome website and platform so people can find my place.

I have been reading others reviews to get tips on what to do but would love any input you may have. 

Thanks

[Robin4]

@Lizzie

I am sorry to be coming to you via this thread but my contact options appear to be somewhat limited.

I am having an increasing problem responding to messages sent to me. The latest being one you have sent in the past day. I type a response and when I hit the send message tab a single line comes up which simply says....'Your message could not be sent just now' and the message I have spent time crafting disappears, no way of getting back to it, but worse than that, the reply option to that message is lost! I no longer get the option to have another chance at replying to the particular inbox message!

And when I try to instigate a new message to you, it tells me that your tag is not a valid recipient.....so, here I am, I seem to have run out of contact options without breaking into another thread!

I am starting to look like I am ignoring messages, and that is the last impression I want to give. I am always able to access an incoming message, I am not always able to respond to one!

Is this a failing in the system or is there something I am doing wrong Lizzie?

Cheers.....Rob

[Lizzie]

Hello @Robin4,

Thanks so much for letting me know about this. It does sound rather strange. I am going to speak with our tech team, but I wanted to check if you have any screenshots, perhaps one of where the reply box isn't showing (try to avoid showing any personal information from the message). I can then send it over to them to try and replicate and fix it. Also, are you experiencing these issues when messaging other community members or does it just appear me?

Thank you,

Lizzie 🙂

[Robin4]

@Lizzie This will seem disjointed because I tried to send through 'messages' and once again I could not send. So this text will read as though it is coming through messages....understand what I mean!!

"Hi Lizzie, Strangely enough a reply box has now appeared again, so I am going to see if the system allows me to send this to you.

After this mornings event this reply box was gone which is why I had to approach you the way I did.

What I will do in future Lizzie is type in 'Word' and copy to this reply box, because it is so frustrating to lose the best part of half an hour of work, with no way of getting it back!

Anyway the gist of my reply was to thank you for the diplomatic way in which you handle these situations....you are a person of great tact, and that is a marvellous skill to posses!

I am also a little disappointed I could not include screen shots on this message stream  because I really wanted you to get an idea of the exchange between ********and I....and it is certainly not something I would want to post on the forum. Anyway, it's not to be but the next time I strike this failure to send message, message I will screen shot it and reply to your post on the other thread."

Well here we are on that 'other' thread and this is the message displayed when I tried to send to you.....

**Image hidden

So, there you go Lizzie and it is happening when I try to send to other hosts messages, so see what you can make of it.....Cheers......Rob

[Lizzie]

Thanks again @Robin4, this is super useful. Yes, I know how annoying this must be, especially if you have spent time crafting a nice message back. 

Thanks also for your kind words. 🙂

Just so you know, I will remove the photo and send it over to the tech team so they can investigate further. I may be back in touch during the process, so we can test it a little bit, if that is OK with you? 

Thanks,

Lizzie

[Robin4]

@Lizzie

Now here is an interesting thing. I just sent a message back to you and it went through!!!!

The only thing I can put it down to, and maybe you can help here...is there a time, or character quantity limit on a private message?

If there is it would be handy to know what those limits are so that I can work around them!

You know Lizzie, while all this is going on I had a bit of a chuckle! Do you remember about a year ago a host 'E......was getting rather upset because he could not find a way to get an 'off forum' message to you.

Gee, I think it's a piece of cake, you are so contactable, I never seem to have a problem....

unless I get a message that says ...'Oops, cannot send your message just now'!!

Cheers.....Rob

[Jasmeet0]

it's look good!

[Bill-and-Jean0]

Lizzie, what happened to the "stat" section. I turned on Airbnb this morning and the "bar" graph showing two years of bookings; past & future, was gone and the section went back to showing what they used to have for the section which is useless and duplicate.

[Robin4]

@Bill-and-Jean0 @Lizzie

I just had a look and, you are totally right!!

The only good thing that Airbnb has done for hosts by giving them a bit more information as to who left what has been removed and we are back to where we were at this time last year with our stats page! Guest star ratings have been removed!

What complete bloody madness is this?? There are so many things they could have backtracked on which would have helped us hosts but, they chose the 'one' thing that actually did help hosts to remove......oh dear, where to from here?

Each day it becomes clearer and clearer, despite our best endeavours to be good hosts, Airbnb are actually trying to make our job as difficult as possible. They are pandering to guest on ever level and trying, to the best of their ability, to keep hosts in the dark.

I have just read the Host Voice responses from Airbnb, which when you read it, is nothing more than a newsletter, not a statement from product research! All it does is give us nebulous statements about why something has been done and does not at any point tell us that we as hosts actually are capable of coming up with good feedback which will be acted on.

God, I get more disappointed with this platform with each passing day! 

Thanks @Bill-and-Jean0 for pointing this out. It really is time for another viable platform to be established, this one is rotting away at the roots!

Cheers.....Rob