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Would be highly appreciated if you didn’t get personal and jump to point out how wrong I am and what a superior host you are.
I am not spreading any “rumor”.
I was specifically referring to the ‘72 hours to report an issue’ new policy that was added to the 2019 policy,
that meant the whole policy was in fact updated to include that. And that Airbnb backtracked this year on hosts being expected to finance a substitute booking. I didn’t say anything about when the original policy was instituted.
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Were you suggesting that they removed the 72-hour part? What was it that you said was removed after hosts protested, pointing out how unfair it was.
Nah, you’re still talking about that policy that was so unfair that it took 3 years to notice it on a public, international website (the same exact website that was so easily found when entering banking information for payouts). It was a rumor and you know that but you’re still trying to spread it, stating it as fact. It seems odd. Thought I’d point it out. See you next time 
I think for that sort of situation, I would expect hosts to have back up plans in place for cleaners/a cohost to manage if you need to leave suddenly @MassHost
This. The majority of guests aren’t scammers. But the AirBnB CS department supports scammers. Vrbo has a “Book with Confidence” guarantee which serves the same purpose as AirBnB’s refund policies, but I don’t hear reports of Vrbo’s CS department giving out refunds like candy.
If necessary I’d pay a $50 fee to take care of a family death. It shouldn’t be more unless you are doing it frequently.
There were dead roaches in my more expensive rental in Austin. I wonder how much I could have gotten?
But the frequency has nothing to do with the fine levied for cancelling an individual booking.
Cancelling 48 hrs or less before check in is something a responsible host would only do for a true emergency- your partner or another very close relative dies, you have an major accident, your plumbing bursts, a tree falls on the house (one host posted about exactly that- a tree fell on her house. She had to cancel bookings. CS refused to consider it an extenuating circumstance, penalized her, and she lost her Superhost status).
So the harshest penalty would be imposed in the majority of cases, 50% for less than 24 hrs. notice. If you had to cancel a week long booking @$75/night, you wouldn’t be looking at a $50 penalty, it would be $263. At a time when you already have an emergency sittuation that will likely incur costs you weren’t planning on.
Not as much as you could have for live roaches.
Best to send in the photo and say that you had to kill them. Perhaps you also have an allergy to roaches?
LOL. I did tell him in a text as I departed about seeing the roaches.
I’m going back to Austin in TX in Feb and am going to direct book with the private room host. Her cats keep the roaches at bay.
Wish my cat did. She’s great at catching rodents and lizards but doesn’t seem interested in roaches.
Were they the little german roaches and not the tree roaches? It was the one near the mothership wasn’t it? It’s in the flood zone (from Shoal Creek, not the river). It floods often.
Yes, they were small and yes it was the one near Shoal Creek though it’s been pretty dry there. The important thing is that they were dead. The ones I’ve seen in my house this year were 2x the size and still alive.
OK, back to the topic at hand (although I love the digressions).
Does anyone see a bit of a conflict of interest here? AirBnB keeps the money they penalize the host, and they are the ones that decide if the host gets penalized and how much. The host loses the revenue from the cancelled booking no matter what. (I do understand the host has to cancel first.)
I thought this was the answer:
Agreed. It is more than I thought. Seems like hosts should at least get a penalty free cancelation within a given time frame.
No, not every deterrent lines the pocket of the intermediary. And AirBnb gets over 10% of every booking already, so they get a lot of money which should cover their work to help rehouse the guest.
It hasn’t been made clear by Airbnb, but perhaps the intention is to use that penalty charge to rehouse the guest, with it being enough to cover what is available when it may be much more expensive than their original booking, especially if it’s a last minute cancellation.
Airbnb used to be good about rehousing guests, so I’ve heard, but that seems to have gone by the wayside judging from the guest posts I read these days where they are left having to scramble to find themselves alternative housing with no help from Airbnb.
I’m sure Airbnb isn’t blind to bad PR from guests and I would not be surprised if this new policy is more about a revenue source for rehousing guests than about trying to rout out bad hosts.
The money is not kept, it is used to rehome or otherwise compensate the guest. I suppose that with the percentage penalty that some money could be kept because the penalty doesn’t necessarily reflect the cost of the rehoming/compensation.
The original policy was more transparent (the one that was protested and withdrawn). In that policy, the host only had to “reimburse Airbnb for reasonable costs incurred to relocate the guest”. I think that’s preferable because a host pays the actual costs and not just a random percentage amount that is not based on costs incurred.
However, I don’t think we can underestimate the benefit of the new policy being more of a deterrent either. I am more than happy to pay a penalty if I have to cancel on a guest if it discourages bad actors from doing so frivolously. Because I don’t underestimate how much bad hosts affect all of us (and our bottom lines). They’ll either improve or go broke and that’s fine with me.
Bad hosts definitely impact all hosts. But that is mostly due to what I have pointed out is Airbnb’s elephant in the room which they don’t acknowledge- their terrible customer service.
If a guest is an experienced Airbnb user and has a bad experience, they generally chalk it up to bad luck and it won’t prevent them from booking with other hosts. If it’s a newer user, they say “I’ll never use Airbnb again!”
But even if a guest is seriously inconvenienced by a host cancellation or other issue, if CS addressed these things in a responsible and consistent manner, guests would feel they were dealt with appropriately and would only hold the bad host responsible, not the entire platform, which encompasses all hosts.
A guest who finds themselves on the street at 9pm in a strange city, unable to access the listing, or make contact with the host, is going to have a whole different attitude about the experience if after phoning Airbnb, they never get the promised “I’ll phone you back in 10 minutes” call, and have to scramble to make their own alternative arrangements, than if Airbnb calls them back in 10 minutes with a new accommodation address and offers to pay for their transportation there.
There are all sorts of possible glitches, delays, and aggravations when it comes to travel. If an airline cancels or overbooks a flight, it’s how the airline deals with the affected customers that determines whether passengers will ever book with that airline again. If they are given sincere apologies, hotel and meal vouchers and appropriate new flights, their customers are much more likely to take it in stride than if they are left standing around in the airport for hours or overnight, having to purchase expensive airport food and water, trying to find out what happened to their lost luggage.