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Yes, it’s always good to have something in writing. But I suggest you disabuse yourself of the idea that Airbnb is your “business partner”, as I can assure you that they don’t consider hosts to be so.
As evidenced by them suspending longtime 5* hosts the instant some scamming guest falsely reports the host for some “violation”, without even getting the host’s side of the story first or bothering to take 3 minutes to make sure the host has mentioned their outdoor cameras, or not bothering to call a panicked host back whose guests are throwing a party and trashing the house.
As far as Airbnb is concerned, hosts are expendable. There are far more listings than guests to fill them, and always more hosts signing up.
That is also something I have a hard time to wrap my head around.
I’m sure you have heard several stories of that happening since you’re a long standing member here but it all sounds so surreal that I cannot comprehend that 5* hosts would be treated like that. It takes more effort to be a 5* host than a 5* guest.
OK I may have been a little too technical on that but what I wanted to express is that in an event of a critical situation with a guest, I most likely will resort to contacting ABB instead of accepting well-known facts. If I don’t reach out to ABB support there will be a 100% chance of nothing being rectified. The least I can do is try…
All you have to do is read through a few pages of the Airbnb Community Center forum to find multiple reports on a daily basis of this treatment.
And Airbnb must have some new, faulty algorithm designed to detect listings that are duplicates of other listings. There have been a rash of freaked out host posts there this last week from hosts used to use property managers, but took over their listing themselves. Even though the original property-managed listing was no longer active, and has all dates blocked out, the hosts had their own listing deleted by Airbnb and Airbnb won’t even talk to them about it. In one case, the host is a new owner, the old owner took down their own listing, but Airbnb deleted the new listing anyway.
Except if they’re savvy guest scammers, they would get around that by only choosing listings with cancellation policies that allowed them to cancel the bookings they didn’t want penalty free.
I wonder if Airbnb has some algorithm that detects whether a guest does this and bans them.
I recall something about a guest not being able to book the same dates at more than one place. Maybe someone else will be interested enough to search for that policy
I also recall that being a policy too, even reading it at some point and reading about guests having one issue or another with it but they must’ve let it go. I often overlap my bookings by a day or two (or recently even for a couple of weeks) and haven’t had any trouble doing it. I did it as far back as 2018 for sure and as recently as last October 2023 for sure.
I also know that they warn you not to request to book more than one place because you can end up being charged for both if both hosts accept.
Hells bells, that is scary. That’s a whole new level for me to explore. So, property managers create duplicates of already existing listings? What for? Is that kind of a split test scenario where the property managers would write a different description to make it more SEO friendly? The owner just could make the property manager a co-host instead. I don’t understand. Still scary.
Quite regularly we have construction companies booking our places for their workers. One time they reserved for 2 people but when they showed up it was 6 of them
Turned out that the other 4 were dropped off at other Airbnbs in the area.
This reservation was made from a normal personal Airbnb account. I’m fairly sure that this guest made several reservations for all his workers. Off the bat, I’d say it is possible to make several bookings for the same time frame. But there may be more details involved that I’m not aware of.
No, the host started out hiring a property manager to list their property and take care of it. So the property manager created a listing for them. Then the host stopped using the property manager, made their own listing, and the property manager deactivated/blocked off the listing they made.
Ok I think I understand. Do I assume correctly that if the owner in this case who creates a listing for his accommodation will start off then with 0 reviews like a new listing - while the one that the management company ran will be taken offline with possibly many (even good) reviews?
Yes, the new listing starts out with no reviews. I think what Airbnb did was create some algorithm with the intention to stop hosts creating a new listing for the same property if they get a lot of bad reviews, or to catch scammers cloning a listing. But all these people who are actually the homeowners or hosts are having their legitimate listings deleted instead.
A lot of naive and/or newbie hosts turn their listing over to a management company, instead of making them the cohost. A lot of management companies insist on this. Then the host decides to manage it themselves, thinking they can just transfer the listing, which you can’t.
Listings being non-transferable does make sense, because whoever is actually hosting should earn the reviews, not some remote homeowner who just collects their % of the bookings.
I’m only RTB, and with my bookings this happens occasionally, especially with new guests who don’t have their Airbnb notifications turned on.
If I had asked an initial question, after a “certain” amount of time depending on the content of the original message from the guest, I deny the request and send the following:
“ Sorry, your booking request has expired because requested info was not provided. If you would still like to book, please resubmit your request with the information requested.
Also, please turn Airbnb notifications on so that you will be alerted to messages and responses from Airbnb and your host immediately after they are sent.
You will love our condo, and we would love to host you!
Thanks for your interest,
Pat
“
9 times out of 10, the guest has had no idea that I had asked them a question, and have rebooked with the info, along with their apologies.
What I wish is that they’d stop poking their nose in our business. Admonishing hosts that they need to “review our ground rules” if a guest leaves less than 4 stars in a review category, letting some poorly programmed algorithms decide what categories our listings are in, “highlighting” amenities in our listings that the algorithm thinks all guests are looking for, when our guests are not, acting like the host has done something wrong and suspending their listings if the host calls to report that guests are throwing a party, or some scammer guest “reports” a host for some totally bogus violation.
If they just stuck to the advertising and middling the money, and having a CS dept. that wasn’t a bad joke, I’d have no complaints.
Thank you for this explanation! I just received an RTB (we’re IB) and the guests asked for something we aren’t willing to do. So instead of declining, I gave them an option to what they wanted, and asked them to withdraw their RTB if they didn’t like the option in order to find a place that’s a better fit.
I would have struggled to find the right words, or even declined their request, if you hadn’t posted this.
