Super Host Relief Fund Invitation

Anyone else receive their invitation to apply to the Superhost Relief Fund? I got my invitation to apply today.

I was surprised to get an invite because I got the chastising email at the beginning of April about how I was losing Superhost status. :rofl:

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Interesting. I thought 1 of the qualifications was that you had to currently be a Superhost, but maybe they counted being a superhost in mid-March when Airbnb’s COVID crisis began.

Wait, so what’s the e-mail say?

First, we hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy right now. As one of Airbnb’s most experienced hosts, your expertise and hospitality are so important to us. We want you to know how thankful we are for the role you play in our community, especially during this difficult time.

We recently announced the Superhost Relief Fund, a $17M USD fund for Superhosts and Experience hosts struggling to make ends meet due to COVID-19. We noticed you’ve earned significantly less on Airbnb recently, and you may be looking for some extra help. We’d like to invite you to apply for a grant from the fund.

Apply for a grant

Once you’ve submitted your application, we’ll let you know within 2 weeks whether it’s been approved. If you receive a grant, you won’t need to repay the money and you can use it however you need to—no strings attached.

How it works

To help determine your potential grant amount, we’ll ask a few questions about how your hosting business has been affected by COVID-19, as well as your financial situation overall. You can read more about how we’re evaluating applications in our COVID-19 resource center.

We want to support as many hosts as we can, but we also want that support to be meaningful. So we’ve put together a specialized team that will carefully review applications and select only those hosts who demonstrate the most need.

Thanks again, [Xena], and we’ll be in touch again after you’ve submitted your application.

Take care,
The Airbnb team

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A lot of Superhosts got those chastising emails, but they were just bot-generated and hadn’t caught up to the new policy, and then there was a follow-up email about how number of stays and cancellations weren’t being applied to Superhost for the April 1st assessment, so to ignore the chastising email. In spite of having received that chastising email, did you, in fact, retain the Superhost status, @Xena?

You gave me a moment of excitement🤯 because I pulled up my rating and saw that I was meeting all the criteria.

But unfortunately no, I really lost it.:scream: I don’t see it on my listing and Superho is listed as “up next.”

Woe is me!:rofl: :woman_shrugging: At least I used my $100 travel coupon at the end of February!

@Xena So which criteria did you not meet for the April assessment, considering they didn’t count number of stays or cancellations? I mean, did you check to make sure it wasn’t just a glitch?

In March, my annual rating was displaying as a 4.7. It is back up to 4.8 now for some reason though I haven’t hosted since Valentine’s Day. I contacted AirBnB three times to complain but they didn’t reply. After that I let it go. It could be 1-2 years before I host again so I figured I’d eventually lose Superhost anyways.

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Well, if you haven’t hosted since Feb, that means you must have had a lower star rating counting a year back from April first, that’s now fallen off the count counting back 365 days from today. Or it could have been a glitch, but I agree it’s not worth getting fussed about at this point, unless it was a glitch and you would have been eligible for some of that grant money.

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Congratulations! I hope to get one and really need it, but not as much as some folks! Our ducks are in a ROW NOW:)

Congratulations. @Xena

Can I ask how long you have been hosting?

And do you offer a whole listing or room in a shared home?

None for me and I fit the qualifying requirements - superpose for 4 years and I make 1/3 of my income from Airbnb. I’m normally nearly 100 precent booked. I did however get my 25 percent of 50 percent email today. I’m trying to make sense of it.

They are contacting people who have been hosting for the longest I understand who based on their analysis fits their criteria between April and May.

I have been hosting for nearly five years and haven’t been contacted as yet.

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Thanks! I’m coming up on hosting five years but I’ve taken some breaks. I host my in-law suite. I used to list as a guest room but added a door and list as a separate space now (under the same listing).

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Congrats! I hope you are selected to get some relief!

Even though I’ve been hosting only 16 months, I was hoping I would get invited just so I could apply and see what happens, but now I think I’ll just decline even if I do get invited. I’m not hurting and it’s better to let Airbnb spend their resources on hosts that really need the help, especially since I’m not sure I’ll even be listing on Airbnb any more. I do hope somebody will post the application (@Xena’s link is not accessible by others) and also the acceptance/rejection responses when they come.

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I submitted my application today. AirBnB tells me they’ll notify me within 2 weeks if I qualify. They asked me how I was affected by COVID-19, what my other incomes are, and what type of space I host. They didn’t want any quantifiable data, and they didn’t want me to ask for a set amount.

The fund is now a max of $5,000 per Superhost out of a pot of $17 million. So maybe 3,400 will get relief. I don’t know how many Superhosts there are total.

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I don’t think it’s that. I have been hosting for a little over seven years, and have been a superhost for six and a half. Fit the other criteria as well. But I’m from a country with a springy social safety net, so I hope it is that keeping my invitation lost in the mail :wink:
Let us know what you hear, @Xena. Pulling for you!

$5,000 is the maximum grant, so 3,400 would be the minimum number of hosts, but that’s worldwide, and you should expect hosts that live in regions with a lower cost of living to get smaller grants and the total number of grants will be substantially higher than 3,400.

Various data I found suggests that between 6% and 12% of all hosts are Superhosts (which would mean there are somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 Superhosts). However, when Airbnb increased the fund from $10M to $17M, they also opened it up to Experience hosts. It’s not clear how much of the money will go to Experience hosts, but it will reduce the number of Superhosts that receive grants from the $17M.

I’ve been hosting 5.9 years and haven’t gotten an email.

I would have applied and shared the info with a select group, but not on the public part of the forum. Since Xena is sharing there is no need for me to do so. :crazy_face: