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So my current guest and I were sitting around chatting and the subject of Airbnb’s terrible CS came up. She told me she once had a booking and the host wasn’t responding at all to any of her messages and hadn’t sent any check-in info.
She called Airbnb and they told her that this was a corporate host (she said it was one of those property management companies with hundreds of listings) and as such, they weren’t required to respond to guest messages! They told her to just show up for the booking and if she couldn’t access the listing, to then contact them. As if a single female traveller is going to be okay with arriving in a strange place, perhaps after dark, and standing on the street with her luggage trying to get Airbnb to rehouse her.
She said she had to make a huge stink about it before Airbnb finally agreed to cancelling the booking and issuing her a full refund.
I knew that Airbnb lets these big property managers get away with stuff the rest of us would be delisted for, but they don’t have to respond to guest messages? That’s really over-the-top.
The guest said that experience led her to always take a look at a host’s profile before booking to make sure they aren’t property management companies, but real hosts.
A lot of times you read guests who’ve been screwed over claiming that Airbnb “always takes the host’s side” or hosts saying they always take the guest’s side, but neither are true- their CS seems just as incompetent and unfair when it comes to guests as hosts. It seems a matter of whether you manage to be lucky enough to get an experienced and informed CS rep or a clueless one.
I’ve heard that Airbnb were reasonably fair with both hosts and guests when they started out, then it seemed like they got very guest-centric, but now CS just seems to be generally frustrating and annoying for everyone to deal with.
I wonder if the CS rep my guest was dealing with who told her that “corporate hosts” aren’t required to respond to guest messages was just making that up (as they so often seem to when giving out erroneous info) or that is actually some internal policy.
There is an implied agreement between airbnb hosts and airbnb guests; we hosts want the guest to READ THE INFORMATION about the host and property before booking. The constant whine of guests who think they are slighted because something they imagined was theirs in their booking, are incredulous that their ‘nonrefundable’ choice was actually nonrefundable, and in this case booking a place with an undesirable host meant that their host was actually not a person, is really loud these days. “Airbnb only cares about…” and “Airbnb did not…” posts only tell me that the guest (or the host) is not doing what they committed to do.
Newsflash: Airbnb does not “care” about guests OR hosts. Airbnb is a web based booking platform. Buyer beware.
If a host has bad reviews and the guest books anyway, that’s on them. But in the case of my guest, she had no way of knowing this corporate host was going to ignore her messages- there weren’t any reviews saying that, so it’s not at all like failing to read the listing info or not accepting the terms of the cancellation policy.
Guests wouldn’t have any idea that Airbnb lets these big property managers get away with what we’d get delisted for unless they have had a bad experience.
In fact, they might assume that a big property management company would be more reliable, professional and experienced than taking a chance on an individual host.
