AirBnB host strike due to new refund policy

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It is not my responsibility to jeopardize my business by standing up for property management companies, slumlords, rental arbitrage investors. They’ll just close their listing and register it under another name. A lot of the hosts these rules appear to be designed for are probably in it for the bucks and couldn’t care less about their customer satisfaction.

Reputable, responsible hosts should not have anything to worry about. And don’t come back with the argument that it only takes one bad guest trying to abuse it. I’ll fight that battle when/if it happens.

Edit. Typo. Also, many of your arguments just don’t logically apply to this situation. You also seem to make everything, and I truly mean everything, a worst case scenario.

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Maybe the site was glitching? The post is still there (I just checked) and it’s grown to 20 pages with 295 responses.

Try going to AirBnB/then the Community Center/ then All Discussion Rooms/ then AirBnB Updates and then find the topic shown in the photo.

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44

If you are implying that the only hosts who have had guests pull refund scams, accusing the host of having bedbugs or that the place was dirty, or that they saw a bug, you are quite uninformed.

These things happen to long time, 5*, small-time Superhosts with one listing (“reputable, responsible hosts”), just as they can happen to anyone. It isn’t some worst case scenario that is imagined. It happens to hosts every day.

Just because I have always had lovely, appreciative guests doesn’t make me arrogantly assume it could never happen to me.

That said, of course every host is free to choose whether they want to participate in a protest or strike, or petition, or whatever, and has their reasons for doing or not doing so. But that this only happens to sleazy hosts or investors would be a false premise on which to base such a decision.

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45

There is nothing unfair about these new policies. In any business, you have to take responsibility for customers, not only, but especially the unhappy ones. If my listing is dirty or the shower doesn’t work then my guests should get compensation for that including relocation if necessary. It certainly isn’t fair that Airbnb would have to pay to relocate my unhappy guests, it should be me. I only pay them 3%, how could I expect them to pay for relocating my unhappy guests?

This is also true for landlords, as a landlord I have to put my tenants in a hotel if, for example, the heat goes out in the apartment. It’s totally fair.

Is it the fear that scammers will lie to get compensation? Every business deals with scammers that successfully get undeserved compensation. Most businesses write these costs off as losses and even account for their possibility in their budget. Hosts should too.

Airbnb is running a business. They’ve always been running a business. And they make money from guests so they are going to make policies to bring in more guests, bring back guests and generally keep guests happy.

Since I also run a business that depends on guests being happy, Airbnb’s priorities align with mine. And though I only pay a measly 3% to advertise on Airbnb, I would have to re-think it if they went the other direction. I am glad they are doing what they can to make guests feel secure about booking an Airbnb listing. It benefits good hosts and it is what we pay them to do.

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I am not uninformed. I did not say it only happens to xxx hosts and I am not arrogantly assuming anything. Sit tf down.

You, on the other hand arrogantly and consistently twist words to mean whatever you want them to be.

You are free to die on your self righteous hill of doomsday scenarios. I’m out of this ridiculous conversation.

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Source?

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51

But their advertising says that it’s “Made by Hosts” and we all leave huge stacked “free” hampers of goodies for them to enjoy. Could that just be marketing BS? I’m shocked!

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I personally think this policy is going to benefit me, but I plan to show solidarity with others. I will snooze my listing for that time period.

I will lose the profitable last minute bookings I get due to cancellations by other hosts. In the long run, I think hosts will raise their prices due to this risk and it will benefit me.

I do think Airbnb will try to strike a balance between hosts and guests because that’s in their best interests. How they achieve that remains to be seen and it will affect my strategy for hosting on Airbnb.

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The problem isn’t “Guests” but “That Guest”. As pointed out in the article I linked to above the cost of a guest relocating could be only 2% (1 week) of your annual turnover but it could also be 14% or 1/7, if there was a considerable last minute cost of finding new accommodation in peak season. They also make the point that Airbnb, like Amazon, is “buying loyalty”, by offering “free returns” as they don’t own the actual product they sell. Nothing wrong with that, I don’t have a problem with the policy, provided it is applied fairly. Sometimes the guest who complains stands for all the people who just put with it so they serve a purpose.

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54

And there is the issue. What issues truly warrant a refund and relocation? And how can you train your CS agents that are scattered all over the globe and don’t have any incentive to be fair. It takes far more time to investigate an issue and make a judgement than to simply rule in favor of the person who is complaining (host or guest), and I suspect their performance metric is how many guests/hosts they help.

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Actually, I disagree. Yes, there are dirtbags hosts who don’t give a darn about the guests and deserve to be whipped into shape through a policy like this.

But on the other hand, there are also dirt bag guests who will take advantage, break rules, scam hosts, and do their darndest to get something for nothing.

There are a number of scenarios where excellent hosts could end up unfairly penalized by this policy through no fault of their own. For example, think about this scenario.

A storm comes through the day before a guest with a month long reservation arrives and a tree falls on the roof of the house doing considerable damage and rendering the house uninhabitable. Obviously, the host is going to have to cancel the reservation. Equally obviously, in a case like that, any host worth their salt is going to completely refund the guest for their stay.

However, under the new policy, the host not only is going to have to refund the guest’s money, they are going to have to pay the cost of the accommodations the guest or AirBnB finds to replace the booking. So the hosts is going to lose out twice over— they’re going to lose the money they would’ve gotten for the guest stay, AND they’re going to be on the hook for paying for the guest’s accommodation for an entire month someplace else. AirBnB hasn’t set any limit of the cost the the alternate accommodations—and they will be last minute potentially so the cost could be considerably higher than even what the host was earning for the stay if they had been able to accommodate the guest.

Perhaps some of you are in better financial shape to weather something like this. However, a host like me, with one Airbnb, would be extremely adversely impacted by an event like this. Hosts who have multiple Airbnb units, where they could put the guest in another unit they own, are not going to be so severely impacted.

There are multiple scenarios where a house could be rendered uninhabitable through no fault of the host. I have no problem with the host being required to refund the money when they cannot allow the guests to stay for a legitimate reason. But I do have considerable heartburn with the host being required to pay for rehousing the guest after they’ve already refunded the guest’s money.

I see considerable scope for scammers to take total advantage of a host. IF there were no such thing as travel insurance, then it would be different. But every traveler has the option to buy travel insurance to cover unforeseen circumstances. Hosts should not be bankrupted for something that happened that was out of their control. And, unfortunately, if there is insurance that will pay for the host to re-house the guest, I am unaware of it.

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56

I see this as a bigger stick to manage hosts with.
Not just control via the review process, but actual threats on how you manage your listing.
A vindictive guest could completely kill your business.
I wonder if Airbnb don’t see this as a tool to drive hosts away from the platform.

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57

Wouldn’t this scenario qualify for EC? I need to read up on EC though.

This is the opportunity for the good hosts though… keep your rates high and you can benefit from the policy if someone else in your area cancels on a guest in the last 30 days. The unorganized hosts may go out of business and the reduced competition means you can charge higher rates.

Of course, it requires running a tight ship where you don’t cancels on guests, and have the type of listing where there isn’t much for guests to complain about.

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And what type is that? You don’t seem to understand that there are guests who have every intention of scamming a refund from the get-go. It matters not a whit that there is nothing to complain about. They just make something up.

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59

Yes as did my AC going out on a 95 F day

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60

Fair enough. I have had my share of people who wanted a refund or compensation and I’ve had to provide some as well. I admit I got scammed by these guests.

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61

Just thinking—my minimum stay is 3 nights so unless someone files a claim within 2 hours of checking out their 72 hour window is over. So my risk for a “we stayed, we want our money back” is low.

The 72 hours may be officially new but Airbnb has been reported in host Facebook Groups as giving refunds after 24 hours for some time now.

Scammers gonna scam. They will find a way.

Good or bad I’ve moved my rentals to LTR. I’ve only got 1 STR left.

Right now, I’ve got a wait & see attitude.

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As do I. Hopefully that scenario would qualify for EC.

I’ve only ever canceled a stay once. In was in the early days of the pandemic…like Late May or early June 2020, I think? AirBnB was still faffing around with their COVID cancellation policy. These guests—a group of 5 unrelated adults from different households and different areas of the country—were coming in for a wedding. I felt, given what we knew about (or, more accurately, didn’t know about) COVID at the time, and given there was no vaccine or real treatment, that hosting them was too risky.

I talked to the guests and expressed my concerns (and told them my cleaner and I were both in the high risk category for a poor outcome if we got COVID—which we ARE) and I asked them to cancel and I would give them a full refund. They refused to cancel so I canceled them and suffered the penalty.

There was another time I would have had to cancel IF I had had guests booked when a group of guests brought in bedbugs. I don’t know if bedbugs fall under the EC policy. Luckily, I didn’t have to find out because they were eradicated before my next booking.

I’m not sure what falls under EC (and I hope I never have to find out) but I would hate to have to rely on AirBnB’s so called customer service to determine the outcome. From what I’ve heard, (1) a lot of them are fairly clueless when it comes to what AirBnB’s policies are and, (2) they lean toward favoring guests over hosts…in many cases not even consulting the host about guest allegations or telling the host what the allegations were.

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Now that sounds like you just got a cluelesss CS rep (or maybe you didn’t bother calling, just cancelled yourself?) because back then near the beginning of the pandemic, both hosts and guests could supposedly cancel under the EC due to Covid concerns.

I only had one reservation on the books back then, that was for the end of March, early April. I kept expecting the guest to cancel, as places were going into lockdown and tons of flights being cancelled and everyone was being told not to travel unless it was really essential.

So when she still hadn’t cancelled about 8 days before check-in, I messaged her, told her Covid was raging here in Mexico, which it was, and that considering that this was a home-share, it would probably be best for both of us, safety-wise to cancel. She was in agreement, I told her to just cancel under the EC policy, indicating Covid as the reason, and that if she ran into any issues with it, to let me know. But she did cancel successfully.

And where she was coming from, SF, went into lockdown 2 days later, so she would have ended up having to cancel, anyway.

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Yeah, clueless CS rep is the correct answer.

Their booking fell just outside the penalty free COVID cancellation policy that was in effect right then. Of course, AirBnB expanded the dates later, but too late for me.