I hosted for four years and had over a hundred reviews, all of them positive. In the last year I expanded from one to two rooms in my New York City apartment. One day last week, one guest called me in the middle of the day and said someone had been calling her nonstop and leaving scary voice messages about how she wasn’t safe and needed to leave immediately. My other guest reported the same. I was extremely confused and called multiple times that day. The help department was unable to give me the tiniest detail, from the lowest levels to management. After all this mayhem, I got a legalese form email essentially saying, “We’re canceling your account and not telling you why. Goodbye.”
It was totally insane. The next day I called again and demanded to speak with someone until someone could explain why this had happened and what I had done. The person talked to her manager, then got back on the line and said something along the lines of, “We’re now deleting your whole account. Goodbye.” Then she hung up. When I called again this week, I waited on hold for a half hour, and as soon as they answered, they hung up immediately. What is amazing is they just wrote me today, as they often do, to ask me to write all my local representatives to help support their causes in the legislature. I took the opportunity to write all my representatives about what a truly terrible company they are. For all their talk about helping the little guy make ends meet, they seem to not give a second thought to completely ruining my livelihood. They campaign ruthlessly for their own expansions and pit their customers and massive war chests against local governments. Local governments need to make a strong stand and repel this tyrannical intruder. These are by far the worst practices and standards of conduct I’ve ever seen from any company in my life. I will now do my part to make sure everyone knows about this.
Hi Poledra,
I actually wrote to them,ported other pages,Trip Advisor, etc etcI did bot say bite, but pretty close, let me copy a paragraph here:
“Fine, I am taking my bookings with me, I have already recovered over $12,000 of what they canceled. I’ll make sure my guests have a fabulous experience..
Luckily, It has been fairly easy to get my many of my guests back. it must have something to do with the fact that Airbnb does not really own it’s operational units: They don’t own the properties and they don’t own the hosts with the talent. When properties and hosts are gone, you have no product,. We are the product.
Take that Reiko and Masa”
Ricardo,
Its cool to see someone intelligent who knows how to get around the bureaucracy and stupidity at Airbnb. I laughed my butt off, did you really tell them “bite me”? LOL
I hear you, let me summarize y story:
I am a Superhost with over 180 glowing reviews. I have listings (had actually) in Quito, Ecuador, Aruba and Miami. Last month I received a group of forints time un reviewed guest, two woman one man. The interaction on the booking process was strange but I figured someone has to give people their firs chance. The stay was one night. They arrived at 6:00 am when check in is 3:00 sent all day out and left early the next morning. The following week one of the females wrote to my inbox:
Hi, your father touched me inappropriately I am offended, refund me.
Mind you mom and dad are in their 70’s married or 50 years and there is a full time maid at the house.
I contacted support to ask them to handle the extortionist and I did not engage anymore.
The guest kept asking for money several times. I received a message from some Reiko woman saying they are canceling ALL yes ALL your bookings in the month while we investigate. I kept calling for updates they claimed they were having technical difficulties and to call back .
I wrote to the Reiko person telling her it does not make any sense to shut down listings in different places of the world if anything I could understand they canceled th listing where the complain happened.
Nothing happened for another week and I called some guy now in Ireland and gave him a piece of my mind. Told him they fail to protect us from guests that can come in our home and create chaos, demanded the issue is addressed immediately and asked to what degree were the extortionists being investigated.
The new day I received an email saying: We are now canceling all your future bookings enlisting your properties and preventing you from contacting guests.
(Little did they Know I had already printed all bookings and told guests we were in the middle of a dispute with Airbnb and there would be a chance we would migrate to VRBO.)
The person named Masa Z wrote “we are under no obligation of explaining to you our decision. Bye.
Fine, I am taking my bookings with me, I have already recovered over $10,000 of what they canceled. I am listing also in Booking.com. I am going to email Reiko and Masa and tell them to bite me. I will take my $50,000 in bookings elsewhere.
My advise to people is to have accounts in more that just Airbnb in case something like this happens.
Cheers!
Ricardo
You don’t get it. Local government is who shut you down, not Airbnb. A neighbor probably complained to the Zoning department who in turn told Airbnb to cease and desist, which could be why you got the cold shoulder.
Airbnb changes name to Microsoft! Now customer service is unnecessary!
OK just kidding, but the term “Airbnb customer service” is an oxymoron.