Has anyone received the 25% refund for cancelled reservations? How about notification of eligibility for the super fund that Airbnb has supposedly put aside to help us? So far I have not seen either.
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No email or money. And I’m not holding my breath…
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Airbnb said that they will send hosts an e-mail in early April. I imagine they intentionally did not specify an exact date, so expect it as late as April 15th.
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Nope. What is this super fund?
I am curious to see who they “invite” as they put it.
It won’t be the little guy… they will be sorting out who made them the most in fees.
Given the eligibility criteria, they will invite hosts that have earned Superhost status for all 4 of the past 4 quarters. It might be more than that, though, depending on how you interpret “Have been a Superhost for 1+ years”.
Somewhat interestingly, it won’t be the big guy, either… since they automatically eliminated hosts with more than 2 listings. Here’s the full criteria:
- Only share their primary or secondary residence—no more than 2 active listings
- Show a reliance on Airbnb as a vital source of income
- Have a verified identity
- Have been a Superhost for 1+ years
- Have lost a significant percentage of their earnings due to COVID-19
With only USD10M, and a maximum grand of USD5K, I estimate they’ll be able to give grants to less than 5,000 hosts worldwide, so the chances of getting a grant are definitely slim.
" Show a reliance on Airbnb as a vital source of income"
I translate that as the host only lists on Airbnb’s site. That will thin the applicable hosts.
I doubt Airbnb has any way to accurately determine that.
It should translate to a percentage of the host’s annual income when the income is below some threshold. Unfortunately, Airbnb has no way to accurately determine that, either.
Very easy to check…I put the name of my properties into google and there it is on every OTA. Any way to limit the accessibility.
Hopefully at least one member here will be invited and share with us what the process was.
Wouldn’t that be by a tax return? It wouldn’t be hard to compare the line on the schedule C or E (US at least) with what the income was on Airbnb if they wanted to eliminate hosts on other sites? I can also imagine the longer one has been on the platform would help.
In any case it makes total sense for them to reward the most loyal, highest revenue, highest ratings hosts.
Think about it this way: if you created a grant program to award millions to a group of your choosing how would you decide the winners?
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I took my apartment from an unfavourable renting position and converted it to AirBnB. The revenue was so much better it covered the mortgage, body corporate and still had some profit. Now that all revenue is gone I have to pay all that from my day job. Not sure if that means my income from AirBnB is vital but it certainly paid all the costs for the apartment.
No, I don’t think they do. However, they could apply a simple formula that looks at bookings versus blocked days.
We list on BDC and HA, so booking from them get blocked on Airbnb’s calendar. For example, out of 365 days, if you had 60 days booked with Airbnb and 180 blocked days then they could make an assumption that Airbnb is not your prime OTA.
I know folks block days for a variety of reasons, so it is an extremely inaccurate method, but with Airbnb you just never know.
JF
Your apartment is your principal residence?
Ten MILLION? What was the Billion for?
The $1 billion is what investors gave to Airbnb.
I see. So 1 percent into product rnto product retention, and 99 percent into…?
Sure, but I don’t think they can verify it (or even would if they could), and as you mentioned, that’s only in the US. I suspect you get invited to apply if you meet the criteria they know about, but they won’t have the resources to actually verify what you put on the application. I.e not so different from how they verify extenuating circumstances or accusations of discrimination.
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Now it says that they will invite hosts to apply in late April. But how far is 10 million going to go. They are giving another live update tomorrow at 3 PST.