Airbnb isn’t the first company in this industry to believe they can treat owners with arrogance. Most readers know who I’m referring to and that company has had an amazing attitude adjustment after seeing both owners and guests flee from their site.
Booking agents are totally irrelevant without owners, who take most of the risks in this industry. But since most owners are small operators and booking agents tend to be huge companies run by overpaid CEOs, they start believing they can enforce outrageous policies and treat customer service as a cost they want to get rid of.
Ever try to call Airbnb? Good luck. Question one of their policies? You get a ChatBot responding to you.
We own many properties and knowing full well how badly they need us, our response to their arrogance is simple: you can rent any of our properties anywhere else, for less. We list on several sites, and Airbnb is useful to us — some guests only look there and they book from the site. Others shop around and we get a hit for the same property on several sites. I’ve yet to see one choose to pay more just for the privilege of booking on their site.
I doubt anyone at Airbnb cares at the moment. After all, they are so much bigger than us. But I’ve seen this before, from their once-arrogant competition. Sales will falter, the C-Club will demand answers (only when they don’t get that fat bonus, forget the obligations to the actual owners of the stock) and people will be sent out to kiss ass and “try to understand how they can be a better partner.” Then we will set terms for them to get equal billing, just as will did with those other guys.
Ultimately, they will listen… money is common language. So from one CEO to another: a storm is coming your way. Enjoy the sunshine while you can.
LOVE IT. Airbnb delisted me and cancelled $40k in future reservations, and kept those that were arriving in the next 4 weeks, I guess they feel the farther out guests would re-book on their platform again. They delisted me because of some mentally unstable guest claiming gender discrimination, after she stayed at my home successfully. Airbnb provided no explanation to me why they did this. A determination was made without any consultation with me and there is no way to reverse the damage done. I have been a 5 star super host for 5 years and brought them $450k in bookings this year, October alone I booked $63k. It’s amazing that I can have tens of thousands of guests come through and hundreds of 5 star reviews and they will take the unchallenged word of some psychopathic guest without even consulting me. I hope you are right that they will come crawling back, but like you I will list my homes on other sites and push to get the same success without AirBnB.
Long term customer Air BnB. Due to Covid, forced to cancel several bookings where occasionally got vouchers or part refunds, but sacrificed several hundreds of pounds in Service fees, which never come back even in part. This, plus no way to get customer service for any issue apart from pretty useless online center, has made me very ready to change my booking allegiance permanently.
So. Who are you? Give me a website