This is a huge issue, judging by the community forums. Would love to hear if others are experiencing payment delays and if/how you found resolution… at this point I’m a week and over $1200 short on payouts
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I had that issue last year and calling Airbnb and escalating didn’t help. Eventually I was paid but it was about a six week wait.
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It’s clearly intentional to float cash flow using Hosts revenue. Media should be alerted. Only way this will end is public embarrassment.
What’s your basis for this conclusion? Sounds… illegal!
I also believe it is intentional and yes, frauduent and highly illegal. To add to the issue, they are also erasing all transaction history for the missing payouts, so guests can’t even verify what they are owed.
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I doubt it’s intentional as it affects only a very small percentage of hosts, and even if it was intentional, they would just say it’s some kind of IT problem until a legal audit could prove otherwise.
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That’s exactly what they are telling hosts- that it’s an IT issue. There have been at least 40 hosts on the CC in the last week alone complaining about not getting paid, some for completed bookings dating back for months, and since the vast majority of hosts worldwide don’t participate in the forums at all, I don’t think it’s only affecting a small percentage of hosts.
Even hoarding the payouts of 200 hosts, when each of those hosts may be owed thousands of dollars (one host said he was owed $8000), results in tens of thousands of dollars on which Airbnb collects interest.
I don’t doubt for a minute that Airbnb is capable of doing this intentionally. I don’t trust them one bit.
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This seems like very low priority given the real news.
I’ve gotten all three of my small payments the next day in the last week.
Same situation on the VRBO (pardon me, Verboh) forums lately. Lots of missing payment complaints.
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When I didn’t get my payout notification email and it had been 30 hours since check-in, I checked my transaction history completed payout tab and upcoming payout tab. The reservation had disappeared from the transaction history.
I used the Help Center Chat to try to find out what happened. It was suggested I check the transaction history tabs. When I replied that I had done that, I was told my question would be forwarded to a specialist.
After 48 hours I had not heard back so I added added to the thread asking how long I would have to wait. I didn’t expect a response and I didn’t get one.
When the guests had been checked-out for a day, I called and was informed that there was a ticket concerning this issue and since I was calling to follow-up it would be escalated to high priority and it could take as many as five days before I would receive the payout.
Today was the fourth day and the payout is now on the upcoming payouts tab and has returned to the transaction history.
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My name is Paul, I’m a host and a victim on Airbnb too. I had a guest, she booked a room on April 20, 2020, for 7 days, after 6 days she extended her booking on Airbnb platform, and she extended again after another couple of days. I received these requests from Airbnb and approved the bookings, everything looked normal in my app and computer. But when I checked my money transaction a couple of days later, I found that I only received the money of this guest’s first reservation, the money of her extended bookings was more than $640 and it did not show in my account. I had called Airbnb for more than 12 times in the past 2 months, they said it’s a computer system issue, they didn’t successfully charge that guest for her extended reservation, they will call me back to resolve the problem, but they never did.
The story was not ended yet and a new story came. Another guest booked a room on June 3, 2020, he canceled it when he arrived, he was outside my house, he canceled it before he walked in. Airbnb called me for this cancellation, I could keep all the money because the guest canceled it in the check-in day. I told the Airbnb agent that I just want to keep one-day money and refund the guest the rest at first, after 2 hours I changed my mind and called Airbnb to give the guest a full refund. When I checked my transaction process 3 days later, I found another tragedy, Airbnb charged me about $89 for this cancellation, I had to call Airbnb again and asked them what the $89 was. They said it’s a computer mistake again, and they will refund me soon. But what I got is NOTHING, I called Airbnb for another 6 more times for this new issue in the past one and half months, every time they said they will escalate the case and refund me, but they never did!
Should I call the police or where can I complain to? Or should I ask for a lawyer?
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I print all booking and transaction info to PDF files. Same with other “you’ve paid the bill” screens, just in case. I was an IT person for 40 years and I don’t trust computers. And don’t get me going about backups.
Did you read the complete host agreement when you signed up? You agreed to submit any disputes to arbitration, in California. Read your agreement, it’s on the Air site. The only time I’ve heard of anyone winning a suit against Air, it was a long battle, and the host won it because Air cancelled her account with a lot of future bookings based on lies from a horrible guest and refused to talk to her.
It sounds like Air may have laid off some of the wrong IT folks — the ones that deal with paying refunds. I would complain to their Twitter accounts. They hate tweets about their screwups, but it gets their attention.
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Almost the exact same thing happened to us! A guest reserved for July 1 through 11th, then extended through the 15th. Their reservation history shows the full amount that they owe, but we never got paid for that last four days. Hours on the phone with Airbnb, countless messages back and forth, still no money, no resolution, and same runaround that it’s a tech issue that they seem unable to fix. We have just signed on as Airbnb hosts and these were literally our first guests, so we thought it had to do with our being new, but I’m seeing that this withholding of payouts is widespread. I don’t see how it’s legal in any way, but what can we do about it?
Bumping this up to say that it has now been 5+ business/non-holiday days (8 days total) and we have still not received payout for a 15k reservation that is done and completed. Our bank confirmed it is not in their system. And Airbnb is saying they sent it but without an ACH number provided there is no evidence of that. Customer service goes nowhere. Has this happened to anyone else?
There have definitely been multiple people report this kind of issue over the years.
https://airhostsforum.com/search?q=delayed%20payments%20order:latest
Whenever I read about hosts not getting paid (and yes, it definitely happens to many hosts from all the posts I’ve read on various forums), it always seems to pertain to large payouts. I have never not gotten paid, but I only have a private room listing for 1 guest, so my payouts are in the few hundreds of dollar range, not thousands. Although the payouts seem to sometimes get released a day or two later than the stated 24 hrs. in the past few years, whereas they used to be quite prompt.
Call me overly suspicious, but I think Airbnb has a certain bottom line they want to show their shareholders, of how much money is in the coffers at any given time and hanging on to $ they owe is a really easy way to do so.
One of the reasons I suspect this is that I have read of hosts who got so frustrated with having missing payments dating back for months, with Airbnb giving them a constant litany of excuses (it must be a problem with your bank, it must be a problem with your account, we have a team looking into it, etc, etc.) that they contacted the guests whose bookings they hadn’t been paid for. They told the guests that they hadn’t been paid by Airbnb for the booking and asked if the guest would mind calling Airbnb to ask why the payment they made for their booking that was completed 2 months ago had not been paid to the host, what had happened to their money? Those hosts miraculously received their payouts there had supposedly been some mysterious problem with the next day. So there was obviously no problem, aside from Airbnb simply hanging on to the money.
This is third-party risk. Anyone who is completely reliant on an OTA as their primary income or even as a secondary income source are subject to third-party risk (payment delays, listing suspensions, penalties, etc.) It can be a significant disruption to your business, cashflow and even livelihood.
Every host who is running a STR business should have a direct booking site (DBS). Even if you dont have the time or want to focus 100% on direct bookings you can, at the very least, process bookings through your DBS each time a guest wants to extend their stay or rebook. Not only is it a win-win for both parties (you save on fees and so does your guest), but you’ll earn more and with the right setup, can have instantaneous payouts (guaranteeing cashflow).
In regard to setting up a DBS, there are some really good options out there. Happy to list them out if anyone is interested!
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An update to this: 11 days later (8 business days from the supposed release of payout) we finally received our money.
They confirmed that they sent the payout on Dec 27, 2022. However, shortly after we called on Jan 4, 2023 to ask where the money is, this payout got moved to Completed Transactions with a NEW payout date of Jan 4.
It appears they did NOT send it out on Dec 27 as originally told to us. This was why they were unable to provide an ACH trace id and why my bank could not find this payment at all in the system. They only sent it after we called. Suspicious and/or concerning.
This amount was then moved into our January 2023 revenue. Even though the entire booking was started and completed in December.
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Also, we take direct bookings already. And this has nothing to do with being overly reliant on third party booking. This is a singular house. So it doesn’t matter if I take direct bookings, I’m still dealing with one reservation at a time. It is pretty easy to see what’s missing.
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