This pretty much sums it up. Would be funny if it didn’t reflect likely reality.
https://www.tiktok.com/@melefante6/video/7081768180145802542?_r=1&_t=8RCHQGZ7FOg&social_sharing=v1
Some hosts on another forum have already sent that to Brian Chesky.
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There’s apparently a Zoom call that has been set up with C. Powell and some of the hosts over on the CC after her “explanation” post of the new policy, (spinning it like it’s a good thing and which she claimed almost no guest would ever use to scam a host, and that, if they did, Airbnb would of course not refund) resulted in something like 14 pages of pushback from hosts.
Is the zoom link posted on the CC? I’d like to be in on that call!
No, another host emailed me about it. Not sure how it worked. Usually those Zoom calls are by invitation. I would bet this one is.
Too bad. It probably isn’t going to do any good anyway. AirBnB doesn’t often take host concerns into account.
I’ve unlisted another listing and now only have one listing on AirBnB. As soon as life slows down a little (after tax season and the primary election) I’m going to start transitioning that last listing off AirBnB also. I used to do only direct booking, but didn’t get enough business that way. I’ll probably go to VRBO and direct booking and have my own website plus use Facebook to get business.
There was plenty I didn’t like about AirBnB already. But not honoring their IB gets you 3 penalty free cancellations policy, and now the new 72 hour refund BS? I think they’re going be losing another host sometime this year.
I’ve never had a scammer as a guest yet, but given AirBnB’s new policy, and the proliferation of blogs and videos on how to scam AirBnnB hosts out there, I figure it’s only a matter of time.
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You last paragraph is how I’ve always looked at it, too. Just because I’ve always gotten good guests, no refund scammers at all, doesn’t mean I’m immune to ever getting one. And just because a policy may not directly affect me, if it’s an unfair policy, I am against it in solidarity with other hosts.
The most outrageous thing about that new policy, of course, is hosts not only having scammer guests being given total refunds, but that hosts would be charged for alternate acccommodation.
I don’t understand how Airbnb can come up with things like this without anticipating that there will be a huge outcry. They never learn. It’s like when they cancelled all reservations at the beginnning of the pandemic. Then they had to do damage control by coming up with the PR band-aid solution of offering hosts 25% of the cancelled bookings.
Which in fact was 25% of the 50% the hosts would have received had their cancellation policy been upheld, so it amounted to 12.5%.
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And some of us (like me) never got a penny. I think there was a threshold on having a certain number of bookings, or a certain dollar amount, before you were eligible? So I think only the high volume and/or high dollar hosts who had pretty full calendars ever got anything.
How many of you on AirBnB got a refund? I had three listings at the time and all of them had bookings and I got nothing.
As I understood it, I don’t think you had to have a certain number of bookings, or a certain dollar amount, but almost the only hosts who got that money were those with strict cancellation policies, because how much the host would have been eligible to receive on a normal cancellation is what it was based on.
So me, with my moderate policy, would not have been eligible for anything, because I didn’t have any reservations on the books that were less than 5 days out.
There were definitely hosts on the CC and as I recall, also on this forum, who said they did get that 25%, except it was actually only 12.5%.
That may explain it. I think I had either a flexible or moderate cancellation policy at the time. I’ve since switched to strict.
They don’t want you to cancel on the precious guest!
This is the same as B.con.
It will evolve to a similar set of policies, host can’t cancel, guest can do whatever suits them.