Out of sheer boredom yesterday I took a wander over to the CC, a place I rarely visit.
One thing caught my eye and that was the number of hosts who have had their accounts suspended by Airbnb, without notice for thirty days. Their crime was having certain key words in their listing description.
Incidentally, a thirty day suspension means ALL of your future reservations cancelled.
It would appear that Airbnb are scanning listings to pick out possible party venues, so the words “party” or “parties” and “event”, if they are contained in your description will raise a flag. The major issue, as far as I can see, is that they are completely ignoring context. If the words appears, no matter how innocently, you’re toast.
It makes me wonder if the CS staff overseeing this “project” are either target driven, i.e. they need to make their numbers, or that they are not native English speakers.
One host who regularly hosts totally legal wedding parties received this:
“We have determined they contain advertisement or promotion of unauthorised party or party-friendly space(s).”
Within twenty minutes or so of them challenging it, they received, from the same CS:
“We have decided to uphold our original decision and we consider this decision final.”
This was just last week, and there was one a few months ago in the US and several more recently in the UK.
The financial ramifications of this, for an affected host, are likely to be severe and reinforces the advice that you shouldn’t keep all of your eggs in the same (OTA) basket, if you can.
I’ve just checked our listings, even though I pretty much knew what was in them, just in case!
JF