Tag Archives: airbnb business model

Welcome to Airbnb, where we don’t care about you

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Here I am in Memphis staying at a record house hostel listed on Airbnb. At first, things seemed to be going okay. I have been doing this for about seven weeks now, traveling and staying in various hostels and Airbnbs. I arrived in Memphis and the house manager warned me that there was a homeless lady who was staying in the room next to mine and that sometimes she isn’t very nice. “Okay, cool,” I thought, “thanks for the warning… but why are you letting her stay here?”

Anyways, I went about my business. not paying this lady any attention. That was until she made me do so. I had put my things in the washing machine and ran up the road to the gas station. I wasn’t gone long enough for my things to finish. When I arrived back at the hostel, she had thrown her clothes in with mine. Immediately I was pissed. Obviously, I mean… who the hell does that?

I left a note on the dryer letting this person know that it’s not okay to touch other people’s things. When she saw the note a few minutes later, she flipped out. She started screaming at me, calling me racist, and telling me to go to hell. Instead of dealing with it, I just messaged the hosts and told them what was going on. They then called Airbnb and reported the lady.

The next day, Airbnb had removed that lady’s reservation and said that the host could remove her from the house. So they did. When they did, she was even madder at me. She threatened to slash my throat and she sat in the street waiting for me to come outside. I had to call the police to get her to leave. The police wanted the report that was filed with Airbnb, and guess what? They wouldn’t give it to me.

What the hell? Are you serious right now? I have the police in the yard, Airbnb on the phone (only after waiting for 45 minutes) and they won’t email me the damn report. What did they do? They sent me a form to give them feedback instead.

The customer service representative essentially said, “I’m sorry you’re having a bad experience with Airbnb. Here, fill out this form so you can waste even more time, explaining something that we don’t care about in the first place. “

Airbnb sucks. Aside from having poor customer service, they don’t offer anything after you’ve had a bad experience. It’s like the CEO’s just said: “we’ve got our money; let them fend for themselves.”

Welcome to Airbnb, where we don’t care about you: that’s what it should say on their website.

Airbnb Changed Prices, Won’t Make Up the Difference

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As a host, I know my market very well and set my nightly rates manually. I do not allow Airbnb to make suggestions or rate changes for my property. Despite this, I received a reservation request from a guest who received a rate $300 less per night for a three-night stay so that I would receive about $1000 less than I should. Every single other night’s rate surrounding these specific rates are all the correct rates that I set. Magically, this one specific reservation request gets different rates, and I am confident I could have filled those nights at the correct rate so there was never any possibility that I would have ever allowed those rates to be published.

When I contacted Airbnb customer service, the first person with whom I spoke did not speak enough English to be even understand what I was trying to explain. She passed me to another agent, with marginally better verbal skills, who told me that Airbnb has the right to set whatever rate they believe is ‘fair’ to get the property booked. Knowing this is not accurate, I asked to speak to a manager who could clarify. The manager did indeed tell me this was not accurate however it still must have been I who changed the rates down (on a holiday weekend, no less) and that I could cancel the reservation myself.

I do not believe that this particular guest is at fault and should not have his reservation cancelled. I also do not believe I should accept responsibility for some “strange glitch” as the manager offered, and then having to live with the very public note that says the reservation was “cancelled by owner” which never goes away. I then spoke with one more manager who told me very seriously that she would make sure the right people were informed and that I would be contacted that Monday.

That was about six weeks ago, and every single one of my emails has gone unanswered. No one will now even speak to me on the phone about it since I had already opened a “case file.” I have been listed on VRBO for almost five years and have never had any issues. Every time I call my issue is resolved, and I am extremely pleased with the reservation requests and bookings I get on that site. I tell absolutely everyone to avoid Airbnb; the properties are just as good if not better on VRBO and from an owner’s perspective, a much better platform. Airbnb will never do the right thing.

New Hosts Beware: Airbnb will Change your Listing

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We are writing this in the hopes of saving other new Airbnb hosts the trouble we have had in our first two weeks as hosts. So, far we have encountered two major problems – three if you count Airbnb’s arrogant, incompetent, inadequate, and totally unacceptable response to our problems. I hope you keep reading because this stuff is actually hard to believe and you need to know it if you are going to try to become an Airbnb host.

In our first week as hosts, we encountered two major problems. One was disappointing. The other amounts to fraudulent representation and downright theft in my opinion. I’ll try to make this as concise and informative as possible.

Creating a listing is not hard. It is tedious. The Airbnb help system does little more than guide you through the screens. No insights, no explanations and absolutely no flexibility. But, with the assistance of the many hosts who posted their experiences in the Airbnb online community and other Airbnb informational websites, we got our listing up and running.

Our listing is a private home. We have two private (each with its own separate entrance) guest suites available. We set the price for our listing at $125, thinking we would be renting each suite for $125. We made sure to disable Smart Pricing and Instant Booking. We got our first booking at our set price of $125 minus a 20% discount as our first guests. The disappointment was learning from our first guests that although we made it clear in the text of our listing that we had two separate guests, that was not the way Airbnb presented our property.

Airbnb applied the pricing we set to the entire listing – i.e. “both rooms” not “each room” – resulting in us getting half as much revenue per room as we wanted and thought we were going to get. Furthermore, we learned when one room was booked, Airbnb marked that date as unavailable on the booking calendar, so no one could even see we had an additional room available. We were surprised by this (and monetarily penalized… keep reading).

After reading through the community forums we discovered we were just one of hundreds of Airbnb hosts who were both surprised and disappointed to learn this. We found out that if we wanted to rent each guest suite separately we had to list them separately. This cost us money with our very first booking. If our first guests would have known they could have booked our other guest suite, they would have booked another family member to stay with us.

We learned our lesson. We will list both guest suites separately, but why did we have to find this out the hard way? Nowhere is this made clear in Airbnb’s guidelines for setting up and creating a listing. We have noted hundreds of complaints going back more than five years about this particular issue but Airbnb has done absolutely nothing to address it. In fact, Airbnb appears to deliberately obscure this critical fact in its listing guidelines. That’s bad. What happened next is far worse.

Within a week we got our second booking, which we accepted. Big mistake. To all hosts: never accept a booking until you have examined every little detail. Here’s why: we had set our price. We made sure we turned off Instant Booking and Smart Pricing. We weren’t looking for bargain hunters. We were looking for folks who wanted a special experience in a magical place and were okay with paying a little more to get it. Airbnb cares nothing for that. If they see a new listing that isn’t getting enough action (making Airbnb money) then they will take action and arbitrarily lower the price without even notifying the host. That’s right – they will cut your listing price without even telling you. Little did we know Airbnb had lowered our price from $125 to to $60 for both rooms, i.e. $30 per room/per night.

Now, we are stuck with a booking that is paying us less than our set price, because as a new host we don’t want to cancel the booking. That’s not even enough to cover our costs. We reset the listing price, using the Airbnb hosting interface, to no avail. The host interface reports the price we set, but the listing continues to show on Airbnb’s website at much lower prices that on average are less than half of the price we set.

We thought this must be a glitch in their software. We spent hours on the phone with Airbnb support, who were absolutely no help. They could neither fix the problem nor explain why it occurred. They said they had to escalate it to “IT”. The bottom line is that Airbnb’s customer support people are essentially script readers. If the problem is not covered in their script then they are useless.

This problem is now a week old. Calling back Airbnb tech support is a waste of time. They just say the incident has been reported to IT and there is nothing they can do. They can supply no time frame as to when or if the problem will ever be resolved. Are you kidding me? I’ve worked in high tech for almost 40 years. I’ve run customer service departments and development projects. I worked in development at Microsoft. This is the most incompetent, arrogant, and totally inept customer service I’ve ever encountered. Microsoft’s customer support (of which I’m not a fan) is a 10 by comparison. Airbnb’s support doesn’t move the needle on the scale. It’s worse than nothing. You think it can’t get any worse? Nope. It can. Keep on reading…

As I said, this problem is now a week old. In that week, we’ve been doing lots more reading and research on Airbnb. We’ve read hundreds of online posts from other frustrated hosts. This is what we’ve learned: this pricing issue is apparently not a glitch but corporate policy. Many, many other hosts have had the same experience. Clearly, what’s happening is that Airbnb is using an algorithm (an automated computer program) to set whatever arbitrary price they think will net the most bookings (meaning money for Airbnb), totally ignoring, and in fact actively circumventing, the wishes of the owners of the property.

In my opinion this is fraudulent misrepresentation and essentially amounts to Airbnb stealing our money. We aren’t looking for bargain hunters. We have a special and beautiful property that is worth every penny and more. All we want Airbnb to to do is turn off their pricing algorithm and leave our pricing alone. That’s where we are now. We have had to snooze (temporarily disable) our listing because we don’t want any more bookings at the prices Airbnb is setting.

Airbnb is literally stealing money from us and apparently brazenly plans to continue doing so to us and others if we allow them to. Airbnb is the most unresponsive and arrogant company with the worst customer service of any company we have every dealt with. They are a multi-billion dollar company. They need to be held accountable. They need to support the folks that are making them money not abuse them.

P.S. This is just the tip of the iceberg. While researching our problems online we read of many others, including those from hosts who have had their listings suddenly disappear and their bookings drop to zero. Beware!

Fake Host Rents out Apartment he doesn’t Own

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My husband and I are the owners of an apartment. A slimy tenant rented our space on Airbnb without our knowledge. I didn’t notice as he had folks checking in at dawn or very late at night. Everyone may have a guest but I saw this child hanging out our second floor window. We do not rent to folks with kids so we had no window guards. I confronted the tenant. I gave him 30 days’ notice to vacate. Sufficed to say, it was a furnished apartment that he then proceeded to move everything out of. I’m trying to contact Airbnb regarding when he set up the account, what were the rates, and what accounts he had the funds go to. When I saw the listing online it said very clearly the rentals were only booked for property owners. What information did he give them to claim he was the owner? Rates that were posted on their site was $100 per night. Was that per room or per person? I did complain about the post; they took it down but he still had bookings for two weeks. They have choices. Airbnb should give me the information or the police, our attorneys, or the media will do something.

Airbnb is Craigslist with Nicer Window Dressing

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I am a landlord. Before you jump down my throat, because I know Airbnb likes to foment class resentment in their advertising (i.e. we just help the little people pay their housing costs), let me tell you what kind of landlord I was.

I never raised the rent more than 2%. I would ask my tenant (my only tenant of 5.5 years) if his financial situation could withstand a rent increase before raising the rent. Any time there was an issue with an appliance or utility, I responded immediately. There was an antique stove with a burner that wasn’t lighting, so I bought a new $2000 stove. The LG dishwasher, which was brand new, didn’t handle hard water well, so I bought a new KitchenAid one. There was a pipe to the washer/dryer that would freeze on the coldest days, so I paid for a plumber to come put pipe tape on it.

I loved this house like my own, because it had been my own. I lived there for five years after a gut renovation. Everything was new and beautiful, and yet I charged rent that was 25% below market at least. I just wanted a stable and happy tenant to love my home too.

My tenant, let’s call him Jack, was a real estate broker. When he moved to my house, he had just gotten a divorce, and had three kids in high school. I figured he would live there while his last kid finished up school, and maybe a few years thereafter, but that he would surely move somewhere cheaper or more fun for a bachelor after a few years.

Two years ago, I decided I probably wanted to sell the house, because I had gotten pregnant with my own child, and my husband and I were buying a different house; we didn’t want or need two houses. When you’re young, maybe you don’t mind losing money every year on an emotional investment, but as soon as you have your own babies, you think about making more money for a college fund one day.

I told Jack that I wanted to sell the house, and I asked him whether he may want to buy it himself or move out first, as I did not want to disturb him with constant showing appointments. Jack told me that he was working on getting his broker certification in New York State (previously he was licensed in Connecticut only), and he could list the house for me. I thought that would be a great idea.

Most tenants have nothing to gain when you sell your house, so they are notorious for trying to scuttle a sale; but in this case, a tenant with a commission to gain might be incentivized to keep the house clean and tidy, and sing its praises. I thought Jack was at a phase in his life where I would lose him as a tenant soon anyway. His youngest child was in her last year of college… I felt now would be a good time to get a sale done, rather than search for a new tenant.

I told Jack I would wait for him to pass his NYS broker examination, which took him several tries ultimately, and I waited for about nine months. Finally, we went to list the house for sale. I asked him around that time whether there was anything pressing that he thought I should alter or repair to improve the chances of a sale. The house is from 1780, and the upstairs has original door frames that are only 6′ tall; he said that these door-frames are charming, but they could limit the pool of buyers.

He also told me he though the roof might be leaking in a studio, which is attached to the garage. I paid for a carpenter to take a look, and he actually said the leak had been going on for years perhaps and it was bad. I paid him to tear out the sheetrock and insulation, and reroof. This delayed the listing by about six weeks, and I thought it was odd that Jack never mentioned this in the  nine months that I waited for him.

When the carpenter came to do the work, Jack had not moved any of his items stored in that studio, which I found to be a little non-cooperative, but maybe he was busy. After the roof repairs, we listed the house. Jack sent me pictures that he staged. The pictures looked great. He hosted a brokers open house, and he said the open house went well. However, he didn’t send me any questions, comments or negative feedback from the brokers.

Months went by. Jack forwarded me an email from a buyer who was going to make an offer. The buyer’s agent said the buyer loved the house, but was concerned about water in the basement. Jack told me he lost the sale. In hindsight, that email was maybe an inducement for a credit or for a proposed solution, but Jack didn’t suggest either.

More months passed. A buyer made a cash offer, which I accepted. After an inspection, the buyer wanted a credit for water in the basement. I thought this was very odd, because in the five years that I lived there, water only entered the basement during torrential hurricane rains or heavy snow melting. I told Jack to tell the buyer that I am going to fix the water issue myself and sell to someone else. I didn’t hear from this buyer again.

While storm drainage in a basement isn’t ideal, I experienced it as a minor nuisance that occurred a few times a year, and the sump pump would eventually take care of. I decided to take a look and get some quotes from masons to fix the drainage. When I got to the house, the basement looked like a horror movie. There were cobwebs absolutely everywhere. Jack had removed the smoke detector down there and thrown it on the floor. The battery was next to it.

I found that the water pressure tank valve was leaking. It’s a steady leak. There’s a blanket on the floor and a bunch of junk scattered about. Jack never mentioned that the basement was consistently wet. He claimed that he “never goes down there,” which the smoke detector on the floor seems to belie.

I vaguely remember that years ago he told me that every time one smoke detector went off, they all went off. I tell him this was intentional, as the system is a modern system and all the detectors are wired together. I told him that when the battery dies, the detector has a specific alarm. I told him how to replace the battery and to hold down the test button. I realize that he must have ripped the detector off in frustration at some point because it was chirping to notify him the back-up battery was low. I would have bought him an endless supply of batteries, but he never asked.

In any case, I paid for a plumber to replace the water pressure tank. I inspected the house soon thereafter. The basement was dry, but still looked like crap because of the cobwebs. At least the issue was contained. I continued to get quotes from masons to fix the storm drainage. I asked Jack whether I shouldn’t just take the listing down until the storm drainage is fixed. Jack started talking about a spring in the driveway, where he thought the water was coming from.

I was like, “What?”

“Yes,” Jack said, “Didn’t you say there was a spring in the driveway?”

I said, “No, what I said was the bedrock formation around the house creates a dry stream in the basement, which just means that rain water flows into the basement during a storm.”

Jack continued to adhere to the idea that there was a spring. I told him that the driveway, which is paved with stone, is dry except after heavy rain. If there were a spring, there would be a little lake there. I asked him to desist from telling people about his spring theory, because it’s crazy, though I tried to be more amicable.

Then I spoke to the real estate attorney, who was helping my husband and me with the purchase of another home (as I mentioned). My attorney told me that storm drainage is like oil tanks. It’s a basic problem that any agent worth his credentials would advise a seller to resolve prior to listing the property. I started to get a sick feeling about Jack.

I got various quotes back for the storm drainage, and decided that the original cash buyer was actually not a bad offer. It was a bit low, but it would save me the headache of managing a $20,000 waterproofing and excavation job. I know the buyer’s name because he had reached out to my father on LinkedIn around the time he made his offer. My father is on the title but is a minority stakeholder, so he didn’t really respond in detail to the buyer except to congratulate him for the accepted offer.

I found the guy on LinkedIn and told him that we were fine with paying him the credit. At this time, the buyer told me he was super disappointed because he was in contract for a house that he didn’t like as much as my house. He told me that Jack was very reluctant to admit that he lived at the house. He told me Jack had a weird theory about a spring in the driveway, that Jack stonewalled him for information about the house, and that when the inspection was conducted, the bathrooms and kitchen were beyond disgusting, and that he found my house as a listing on Airbnb.

I was appalled. I immediately contacted Airbnb. I told them that I could furnish a copy of my deed, and I would like the rental records for Jack’s rentals. There were two reviews on Jack’s profile for rentals of several months-long guests, during prime selling months, during our listing agreement. Jack’s tenancy also prevented long term guests (over two weeks) without expressed written consent.

I told Airbnb I could furnish a copy of Jack’s lease as well. Airbnb simply told me that I should work things out with Jack. At this point, I was considering suing Jack; I was definitely evicting him, so I wanted proof of how long he rented out the place. It’s my freaking house, so I felt I was entitled to a rent roll for my house. Airbnb told me they will release this information with a court order. Meaning, it’s incumbent upon me to sue Jack.

I ask Airbnb whether they require hosts to upload their deed or lease agreement, and they said “We care to the utmost and we require hosts to represent that they are legally entitled to list the property.” I asked the child attorney writing me this email from Airbnb whether HR called their law school to verify their law degree, or whether they were allowed to simply “represent” that they had a law degree.

Then I realized that Airbnb isn’t a real service. From a legal standpoint, they don’t care whether they are facilitating fraud and theft. They don’t care, and their response will always be “just sue me.” Eventually they will be sued by enough people, because what they do is wrong. My tenant would never have been able to violate his lease/listing agreement like this without the ready infrastructure that Airbnb provides. Section 230 means that Airbnb doesn’t have to care about fraudulent listings.

They are, after all, merely selling individuals the ability to publish, and they have no interest in the content, right? Except that they collect a fee. Except that they have “customer service” to make people feel good and comfortable about listing, when in fact their customer service, from a legal standpoint, is just a goodwill gesture, and not a regulated activity that can be held to any standards. People need to stop thinking about Airbnb as a housing service. It is not. It is Craigslist with window dressing.

Host telling me to cancel so he can keep the money

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I booked an apartment in Barcelona for my partner and cousins. We are planing to spend a few days there. I got confirmation back from the host saying they had accepted and taken the money. I emailed them back requesting since I have paid already could I please use the two rooms with the double bed, not the sofa bed. They said they will “try” as the listing is still up for other guests. If I don’t want more guests in the house I need to pay them directly also if I don’t like it then I should cancel my reservation so they can keep the money and I should look somewhere more suitable. All I asked for in the first place was the use of two rooms with double beds. When I reminded them that all emails are recorded they said they know and since both parties aren’t happy I should cancel. They are pushing me to cancel my reservation.

Airbnb Hosts Have it All When it Comes to Refunds

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I’m here to share a little of my bad experience. I’m going on vacation at the end of July, and decided to travel around Croatia from August 8-11. I rented this place on Airbnb; I booked the flight and got everything set. Everything was going okay until a few days later, when I realized that instead of booking the place for the August I mistakenly booked it for July.

I messaged my host as soon as I could telling him about the mistake around July 2nd. He replied that unfortunately he didn’t have any other place available for August so I should cancel my booking as soon as I can to get as much back as I could. He said he would try to contact Airbnb to see how he could refund me, since all the process is automated.

Since I booked the place one month earlier the refund policy was not applicable anymore and I got no refund, even though I canceled my booking. It turns out that I could never get my money back. I tried to contact Airbnb and they told me that unless my host wanted to, there’s nothing they could do. I asked if they don’t think that what he did was wrong and all they said was that they could not punish him because he never violated the rules.

I know that the policy states that cancellations made within a week before the booking date will not be refunded, but I think hosts take advantage of this misfortune to trick guests into cancelling bookings just so they can rent the place again. This kind of behavior is just unacceptable.

Airbnb Host Guarantee is Airbnb Host Fraud

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We have a brand new house that we have listed on Airbnb and we recently had a bad guest. We made a claim using the host guarantee. To be honest the Airbnb Host Guarantee isn’t worth the toilet paper it’s appears to have been written while Chesky was sitting on the can. It’s a huge scam and needs to be the subject of a consumer fraud class action suit.

For $1,800 in damages that this guest caused, they offered us $251. After doing some research, we found they offer everyone about $250 no matter how much damage the guest causes. That has to amount to billions that hosts have lost around the world.

We have an almost new house, six months old at the time the guest stayed there. The lit hookah coals on our new glass stove top permanently disfigured the top. That part alone without installation is over $200. The installation is over $200. A new stove is $700. They offered us $130 for that.

Our house rules clearly stated there was a $300 fine for smoking in the house. When they left the house they left all of the windows open, the air conditioning on, and the vent fans on because of the smell. This guest also disconnected and removed all of the smoke detectors. He used the toaster oven as a step stool to do this. He took the batteries out of the detectors and didn’t put them back in. They were all going off because of this.

They didn’t pay us the fine, for putting the smoke detectors back in or replacing the smoke detector batteries. All of which cost a lot of time, which is money. The brand new toaster oven which cost over $50 to replace plus a trip to the house? For that they offered us $20. What kind of crapola is this? It goes on from there. In short the host guarantee is the host ripoff. Calling it a guarantee is a fraud.

Host’s Calendar was Full, Didn’t Bother to Tell me

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I found an apartment from a new host. I liked it and booked it. After arriving, I noticed it was an agency’s apartment. I tried to book more nights but the host didn’t let me know that her calendar days were not available (didn’t update the calendar, as many hosts don’t do). She let me know which days were available so I booked and paid; she accepted it.

I was thinking there was an automatic system for calendar updates but now I know many hosts play with calendar days to be full when guests try to make bookings so they get money from 2-3 new guests at the same time and then also half of the cancellation fees. The calendar days were available and then full when I made the reservation and paid. She accepted it; the calendar was available to me and then it was not.

After that she sent a new reservation request with new days, without telling me about another guest’s reservation for the same days. Only after the payment was accepted did she tell me she had other guests arriving also for the day and so I had to shorten my stay. She also changed the check-out time to be earlier without any mention of it before. Because of this, she would get more money for shorter stays and I couldn’t accept it.

I declined her offer because I made bookings for those days. The host also told me I could pay with cash but I never do this with anyone. I had to search information on how to cancel the payment for my five-day reservation. The host accepted the reservation and got half of my money without telling me how to cancel. It was the host who was messing with her calendar and changed the days. In the end, the host got more than half of my payment because Airbnb’s cancellation system works like that; it work well for hosts and badly for guests. You lose money if you have to make a cancellation as I had to. I did nothing wrong but the system is making it the guest’s fault when a host plays with the calendar days to be full.

Before this, I heard only positive brags about Airbnb. It’s an incredible system, but it can’t work if bad hosts can do anything they want. There is usually not enough help for guests. I have to wait 1-2 days to get any answers from the Airbnb customer service team. Nobody has helped me. I’m a guest and when I see rules, I follow rules. I also have to verify my profile every time I log into Airbnb. The system is working much better for hosts when they can do anything that they want. Hosts should be more trustworthy. It’s like they are sending guests back to camping and hostels after these experiences.