Hello, I want to share my experience with you. I had a reservation from a customer worth about $550 under strict cancellation policy. I had sent a message to the client 10 days before his arrival to arrange check in. He didn’t answer. 1 day before arrival the client canceled the reservation and airbnb sent me a message that if I want to give a refund to the client it was up to me. Then the customer also sent me a message that he did not cancel… but probably some hacker or something else??? and that I have to give him all his money back and after that he will make a reservation again. I contacted the Airbnb support telling them that the case seems strange to me and because it is only 1 day before the arrival I am afraid that I will lose my money anyway because it is difficult to make a reservation again. They answered me, of course we absolutely respect your decision and thank you for being a superhost. Until then, the reservation seemed to be canceled by the guest and that my refund was scheduled on the second day of the reservation. After a few hours, however, the reservation changed to: canceled by Airbnb and the refund I will receive is =0 . Of course, the specific customer never made a reservation again, nor did anyone else, and the money was lost on those dates! Sent to support again,They replied that the guest is receiving a full refund!!! I asked why the host is not receiving the refund as agreed? they didn’t send again what happened but only the familiar automatic messages… Has anyone else had a similar experience in the past?
“Please contact airbnb about this”
Never negotiate or interact with scammers.
Exactly,after these messages I contacted Airbnb support and guess what they did…They Fully refunded the guest!
no, what was meant was to tell the SPAMMER to contact airbnb.
Yes,I told him to contact Airbnb support,after their conversation the support replied to me if I want to refund this guest,I said no, they replied: yes we totally respect your decision.And after a few hours Airbnb fully refunded the guest and modified the cancelation to : canceled by Airbnb with no refund for me.
Start a new support ticket.
Document the timeline you told us. Ask why you strict policy was t upheld as the guest cancelled.
Show screenshots of the email saying you have the option to refund or not.
Show screenshots of support saying they understand your choice. What happened is the guest called and got a sympathy CS rep who gave a refund.
You have to fight this BS and get a CS on your side to look at everything. If you do their job FOR them it helps them side with you. Document everything in the timeline with screenshots so they see all the ‘events’ .
Makes it easy for them to help you. Then they can easily see how the guest worked the system after they failed to work the host on the cancel.
Good luck.
Exactly what I did! Lets see what will happen now…
It’s sad that it has come that far…
In the year 2024 technology doesn’t seem to have it made easier or more efficient to handle business. Airbnb should easily be able to access all these events in the chronological order as they happened as every little bit happened on their own platform.
Even an ‘empathic’ CS rep should have seen and understood that - unless the guest presents some doctored screenshots and lying about what happened.
Airbnb ambassadors replied that they still investigating why the guest refunded…
I think this was the new tactic that the scammers were using to get a full refund.
Since there is no serious reply from Airbnb I’m afraid that in the future guests will be able to get a refund when ever they want and the host pays the bill.
After my experience, the trust with Airbnb is lost forever
I fought with Airbnb about compensation about a bed that was broken. I kept after it for three months and continued to request that it get escalated. I would start to make progress and then they would close the case and I would have to start again. I wrote, I called, I begged, I cried.
I finally got someone who did not close my case and actually look at the evidence and to show how the guests threatened and bully me and how they hid the breakage. I also had the next guests who discovered it stand up for me too.
It can be done. You have to decide how much your time is worth. For me, I got compensated for a very expensive bed but I probably put in over 20 hours of my time trying to get this resolved. So let’s see 1000 dived by 20 = $50 an hour. Not too bad.
In my experience, if you are based in the US and can call during Pacific time you are more like to get a US Call Center. Always be respectful and truthful. There are CS reps that do help but they are few and far between.
You seem to be under the impression that how the individual CS reps handle cases represents Airbnb policy. It doesn’t- half of them don’t even know policy, and give out entirely false information.
As Lynick outlined, it often requires a great deal of time and persistence to get to a rep who is helpful.
I had one instance this year where a guest cancelled half a day before check-in, after holding my calendar hostage for a month, and wasting my time messaging extensively with her trying to accommodate her bizarre and entitled demands.
I also had an Airbnb rep phone to ask if I would agree to a full refund, to which I said no. I got paid in accordance with my moderate cancellation policy.
Additionally, when I received a notification that this guest had left a review, I called and said she had no basis on which to review, as they could see she cancelled at 4am on check-in day (she had also told Airbnb that if I didn’t agree to refund she would keep the booking and not cancel). They removed her review before it was even posted.
I have called the support about 10 times and each time they tell me something different. we still come to the conclusion that the case is under investigation… really a lot of wasted time to claim something that there was no reason to claim!!! Tired of Airbnb
That’s what I mean- you talk to 10 different reps and get 10 different answers.
They hope to wear you down so you’ll just give up.
I think the best approach to these situations in terms of the host’s sanity is to:
A. Assume it won’t be resolved quickly. If it is, you are lucky.
B. Don’t let it get to you emotionally. Think of it as just another business chore. “Okay, guess it’s time to bug Airbnb about that undeserved refund again.” When you are not actively dealing with it, try not to think about it. Unless you are really living on the edge financially, it really doesn’t matter if the refund gets reversed this week or 3 months from now.
C. Keep the 3 P’s in mind. Patience, persistence, and politeness. Airbnb reps are not direct Airbnb employees. They work for a 3rd party company that contracts out customer service to many big companies. The reps are poorly trained, poorly paid, and get paid on the basis of how quickly they can close cases.
I have turned reps around from acting like robots by treating them like people. I always thank them for responding, even if their response wasn’t helpful. I have told them I know they have a hard job. One rep apologized and started being helpful when I pointed out that her response- a bunch of links to Help pages which didn’t address my issue, was the kind of response that leads to the extensive bad press and social media postings about how bad Airbnb customer service is. I worded it so it didn’t sound like I was personally attacking her, and said I know that she was just following the script that Airbnb tells their reps to, but that paying attention to whether a host is a newbie or has been hosting for years should enter into deciding to send links to basic information that an experienced host would already be aware of. And that it’s important to actually read the host’s message and comprehend the issue rather than picking out key words like “review” or “refund” and sending links that are irrelevant to the actual issue.
Whenever dealing with CS for any vendor/provider, I always say, “I’m not annoyed with you personally; I’m annoyed at the situation. I understand you are just doing your job. Thank you for your help in getting this resolved.”
Even if they obviously haven’t been trained, don’t know the organization’s policies, or seem to lack some skills.
Puts us on the same team. I’ve gotten expressions of astonished gratitude that I am treating them like a human being.
My momma always told me “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”. A “Please, can you help me make this right?” will get you a lot further than “you &*$#$ idiot!”
I am always call to speak with airbnb representatives until my problem resolved. Yes it’s takes more time but only this way you can achieve positive resolution.
I’ve only contacted CS on twice in many years, but anecdotally contacting them on social media is more effective.
Except that looks to me like I paid $50/hour (assuming that is the minimum rate at which I work) because the $1000 bed was just to make me whole from the guest….