I was considering doing that, calling back and insisting on speaking with a supervisor. I tripled my prices, for the area most people get $100 a night because the market is flooded with rentals. I put the price of my house at $399 a night as the highest, and $299 as the lowest.
Facebook and Twitter âGuest told me they were going to throw a party despite no party rule and 8 guest maximum. Air CS told me they would advise guest no more than 8 at the party and I had to accept that, Air supervisor unavailable for appeal. This violates covid rules, I cancelled, and Air penalized me.â
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For what itâs worth. We donât do instant booking. We donât allow parties or events. We pay no attention to solicitations from ABB to become super hosts or Plus hosts or any other diddly stuff. Granted, we are not in this to make a bundle. We want to cover the basic costs of a guest house, insurance, taxes, utilities, maintenance, etc. and we can do that with 90 days of bookings per year. We then have the place for friends.
I could not see trying to do this to make a living or max out the occupancy. Some people have to do that and itâs too bad. Maybe they should think of full time tenants.
I just had an issue on Monday 8/17. My calendar is pretty booked but had a cancellation, a new ABB user wanted to book, I have IB but they were going to be checking in late so they messaged me to make sure late check in was ok. I approved their request, and about 1.5 hours later she messaged again, said she couldnât book, was getting a message to try again later. I think it might have been they needed to verify her ID. Either way, I called CS and waited 45 min for any type of response. 1.5 hours a later, 2 hours later, the guest was on their way to my, city still no response. In the past I had one or two times with a problem and they fixed it, but after calling back, being told the case was escalated (they said that on the first call) and then hung up on, I called again. They basically told me the operators answering the phones are just like an answering service. So you can insist on talking to a supervisor but they say they cannot put you through, there is no one there to speak to. I heard back via message, at 4:53 AM, this morning, 3 days later. They laid everyone off at the start of the pandemic, but we all know they are making money now but not rehiring anyone. Just beware, if you have an immediate issue, you will get no help right now.
Perfect time to go public âŚ
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Airbnb stopped being a responsive or helpful company at least 5 years ago; they are too big, too full of themselves and really donât give a damn about their hosts, it is, alas, just another big business and you can forget any emergency help, much less just responsiveness. I did get some joy sometime back going to the FB page and using the messenger. There are NO good choices for renting your home, some small regional ones popping up but I canât say much for any of the others , TA and VRBO all are companies that will cause you problems one way or another. I left VRBO at least 10 years ago, I still would not go back to them. So few choices.
Why? I donât use them yet so am genuinely curious.
AirBnB support is not existent these days. We a guest get a refund for 2 days for mosquito bites they received outdoors and we just had a payout for a reservation that is $414.12 (SHORT)! Its been 72 hours since I contacted AirBnB and havenât heard a thing. Its a pretty helpless feeling because there seems to be no recourse for matters like these. Does anyone have suggestions on how to get AirBnB to actually handled customer service matters???
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It amazes me too. We get an advertising platform, a message system, credit card processing, systems such as IB and SP, the ability to update and change our listings as often as we want and yet people still think that they are entitled to âcustomer serviceâ.
Customer service doesnât exist to sort out problems like guest damages, guests not leaving on time and so on. The former is what our insurance companies are for and the latter is what we are supposed to do to justify the money we earn.
I once read of a host who called Airbnb expecting them to do something about the fact that their guests were making too much noise. And the guests were in the same house with the hosts.
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As with Airbnb, when the contact with company representatives proved to be something that made me very cross, more than once, snobby uppity know-it-all and obviously out of their depth -I got out. Besides that, they are too expensive, and pitch you against other renters in the area; the constant competitiveness really gets to me; I am not in this to compete, just to advertise our property, furthermore there are so many in my area now on VRBO that I was not showing up enough. I am on the no prepay plan on TA, which I prefer. VRBO was owned and started by some of the nicest people you would want to know, I am in touch with one of their team to this day. When the company was sold, it changed completely. These are big money making companies that could care less about you as a home owner. The kind of people that run this company and the people that they employ that I have had to deal with are not my kind of people. None of the home rental agencies (big ones) are that great - they are a necessary evil - but VRBO above all, got on my bad side a long time ago.
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We had noticed the same thing early on in our STR journey. In our market, Airbnb seems to be the main platform for STR, I was told that early on VRBO would be mostly older guests. This has not been the case, generally speaking our VRBO guests had been more apt to break house rules, the home was left messier, and the cancellation rate seems to be higher. (The cancellation policies are more liberal). Initially we wonder if those banned by Airbnb just jumped over to VRBO.
Fast forward, after COVID 19 or reservation have jumped from 10% VRBO 85% Airbnb and 5% private or direct book of prior guests annually to right now pacing at nearly 30% of our bookings for next summer being VRBO. This leads me to believe that guest are either angry over customer service with Airbnb or they are having trouble using the platform. Interesting enough, during covid VRBO did not force refunds outside of hosts current cancellation policy (they encouraged refunds but allowed us to make business decisions) one man on here mentioned âAirbnb is not there to manage your property â umm during covid they over stepped their role then. With VRBO when a guest requested a cancellation/refund outside of our policy, I first offered a rescheduling option, and if it was for an event and it would not reschedule I did give a 100% refund. 50% of the requested cancellations did reschedule. Airbnb has really done a poor job during this pandemic, they first overstepped their governing powers and pushed hosts in a corner, not allowing a host to make other arrangements with guests (such as a reschedule of the trip) this is them running our businesses. Now they have fallen off the map with customer service, and they just months ago were running our business how they saw fit, they now are leaving even a call that requires them to engage unanswered. We have seen rebooks of previously cancelled trips, I suspect because we have loosened our cancellation policies on VRBO, hoping guests will feel safer booking, we have been happy with the recent quality of the guests on VRBO, we are evaluating how the looser cancellation policies impact our business, but all bookings since the initial outbreak and scurry to cancel have stuck. It will probably be next summer before we understand if the more liberal cancellation policy causes us trouble. But we are trying to make a shift to diversify our business more equally between our platforms. Airbnb just crapped the bed, and VRBO seems to have stepped up. They too have some hiccups, but at least there is someone that answers the phone and helps when you really need them.
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I canât say that I favor VRBO as I had major hassles with their very young, biased and mouthy, inexperienced staff maybe 10 years ago, but in these times, I guess it is worth re evaluating the situation. We donât have a lot of choices out there, unfortunately a few companies have the corner on the market. I was told by someone high up in VRBO at one time, the possibility of starting a small company is next to impossible. There are just too many big hurdles in todayâs world. Sad.