Example of how Airbnb treats its seasoned hosts like babies

This is a good point. It seems that people are starting to get over it but remember how many posts we’d get from people upset they weren’t viewing guest photos prior to booking? So many people sure they can tell something about a person from looking at their picture tells me lots of people are proud of their biases. (I mean, I knew that, it’s just another data point from well meaning folks.)

I don’t need Airbnb or IB to prevent me from being biased. I have no conscious nor unconscious bias against anyone on the basis of their race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation.

And if a guest said they were coming to attend a “Unite the Right” rally, you can bet I’d decline their booking and not have a guilty bone in my body about doing so.

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This is a longstanding and interesting research project on bias – it’s fun to take the assessments and it adds to the database.
By setting aside being defensive or judgey about myself I found the results informative – to my surprise I had unexpected assumptions about women in science that I could be more mindful about!

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

:+1: Yeah, hope I don’t get any of those.

That is literally impossible and almost laughable. It’s as if you don’t know the meaning of the word “unconscious.”

And now you admit to conscious bias.

What do you think the word “bias” means? Surely there is some miscommunication here.

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Yes, I can see where I wasn’t clear. It would be a very rare person who had no biases whatsoever.

What I was referring to was bias that would prevent me from accepting a guest based on their race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, as I said.

For instance, my experience has taught me that young Mexicans who come from well-off families and have grown up with maids tend to leave a big mess behind them. You could call that a pre-conceived bias, but it would never stop me from accepting young Mexican guests, it would just lead me to make it clear to that demographic before they left, what is expected in terms of cleaning up after themselves.

And I didn’t mean to say I have no biases whatsoever. I definitely do and would not be open to hosting insurrectionist-type gun nuts or Covid deniers if they made their views evident in messages or their profile info.

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@dpfromva, what I prefer about IB is that they don’t ask for discounts :wink:

Hey @Jefferson
Thanks for pointing out my mistake on that now deleted post, I don’t post a lot on this forum, though I have been reading it since 2015. I mostly post on all the FB STR forums, which has a slightly different vibe/style/acceptable practices. And where people are asking certain questions daily, so it’s become habit to post links to each other, all the time.
I will be more mindful on future posts!

Your vibe is just fine, you do you.

RR

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No need, the comments in the other topic are still valid re your referral link. Just surprised no-one else has added theirs :wink:

JF

I don’t disagree. However if I remember correctly when they implemented the auto blocking, they also allow the host to manually unblock those days.

I’m not sure the flag of host needs a response would help much. It’s common for guests to set up alerts go to email. If they check email one or two times a day they can easily miss it.

If I could tell Airbnb that I’m waiting for the guest to respond to a question, then Airbnb wouldn’t have to hound me to accept/decline. And wouldn’t have to block my dates because a guest didn’t respond. And I wouldn’t have to figure out how to unblock the dates with a workaround because their API system prevents me from simply unblocking them as you say… Its a bit complicated to know what I’m talking about if you don’t use an API connection. And this whole topic would be moot.

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Thanks for the pushback. I understand your position with 1-2 listings. But I think about automating everything because I’ve managed 20 listings at a time on airbnb. During the holidays it does become quite arduous when you have to keep track of what is going on with 50 inquiries/requests/bookings a day. So my criticism is me venting at their incomplete/bad/not well thought out/ could be better policies and procedures.

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Sounds like it might be worth you employing someone to help - I certainly would if I had a medium scale property management business like yours