Post by High Priestess on Oct 5, 2015 2:24:02 GMT
Jose shared in AUG 2015
5 ways Airbnb is just another big, evil, corporate company
tinyurl.com/evilairbnb - The story of how Airbnb is not loyal to hosts
tinyurl.com/airbnbevil Thanks for the tip!
try this: bit.ly/1Jryi8N
Keith:
ok, now that people can read it.. here are my comments.
There are some grammatical issues with the piece, but aside from those:
regarding "hypocracy". My answer to airbnb reps advocating for a refund is always "if airbnb refunds fees, I'll refund fees, if airbnb feels the customer should pay them they they should pay me too."
If all hosts adopt the same refund policy as airbnb has for themselves, then customer pressure will force airbnb to change. As it is, airbnb feels entitled to their fees because the guest pays them and they are advocating for the guest in some cases and hosts in others. so their logic is that they are still providing a service to the guest in helping them get a refund and should be paid for their part in the transaction.
2) guest isn't always right. You're dead on here.. the airbnb CX person should have read your check-in instructions and pointed them out to the guest.
I would insist on getting paid for this reservation...I doubt you'll have success but this actually caused an inconvenience for the guest who had to be relocated as well as the host and the CX person could have resolve it -- or the guest could learn to read.
3) airbnb mistakes.... it's not clear from your writing how your pictures were deleted or what the careless mistake was--you should be much more specific about this. was there a bug in the UI and the pictures were deleted? did they manually remove them? etc... it's important to understand how the mistake was made.
AirBnB seemingly has no QA process or people on the engineering side. so many bugs make it into production that if they have a QA team they should all be fired immediately.
I had 2 cases last year where booking requests never made it to me or my inbox. I missed out on them. months later I noticed that I had unread messages and those requests suddenly appeared AND my response rate went to 99%... I reported these errors and the lost revenue and no one seemed to care.
Since then I've actually had those reported to someone in Engineering but since those bugs are supposedly fixed, nothing can be done about the past.
4) Double Standard on response time. You're on to something here too. CX doesn't have uniform responses.. 2 calls to 2 different agents are likely to get different answers to the same problem. escalations I understand are slow and get lost. This needs fixing. I will say, from seeing what people on the groups post about calling CX, people put too much a burden on CX ... seemingly calling or emailing over minimal things.. perhaps if hosts reserved customer support calls for real issues and not just every minor little thing that comes up, they could do a better job. This doesn't mean AirBnB CX doesn't need to do better-they do, but hosts (and guests) need to do a better job of trying to resolve issues on their own and only calling for help when help is really needed.
5) Superhost support -- again, the theory behind this is that superhosts don't need to call CX for every little thing so they should only be calling for serious matters and therefor get priority. My understanding is that superhosts are given a special phone number to call (when you go through the help/resolution center to get to a phone number, the number is supposed to be different)--if you're calling some older number you found online or saved in your phone it may not be the right number. I dont actually know if they do routing based on caller id....my guess is they don't although they probably could.
One of the problems AirBnb and Uber and other "sharing economy" "transaction facilitator" companies have is that they're not actually the product they're selling. if all they do is act as a liaison between a consumer and a supplier, then both consumers and suppliers can go elsewhere pretty easily.
Drivers often drive for lyft, uber and sidecar and will switch back and fort based on what's most convenient for them at the time.
AirBnB is doing a good job of building customer loyalty and is the only company I'm aware of that even tries to give hosts any sort of consideration. While they may have a long ways to go to get better, their competition isn't doing much of anything--at some point that will change and if those companies can woo away top hosts, airbnb will be in for another uphill battle. if they're smart, they'll work to remedy that and raise the barrier to entry for competitors.
Jose
Jose:
Thanks, Keith. All good points. I apologize for the grammatical mistakes, they tend to be more common the more heated I am about a topic haha!
My takeaway from what you wrote is that I'm not alone in these issues. My objective was to get Airbnb's attention since I still have a few pending matters with them that I'd like to resolve (getting compensated for their reps mistake of accidentally deleting my pictures - I don't have any more details as to what happened here exactly either since I never got a straight explanation for it) and getting compensated for a booking that was cancelled because of my guests negligence by not reading the check in instructions and the Airbnb support's negligence in not suggesting that the guest read the check in instructions and instead offering me a 30 minute response time limit which he couldn't match himself.
It helps to share these issues, especially if I'm not alone, to bring attention to them and more importantely, to bring change.
tinyurl.com/evilairbnb
5 ways Airbnb is just another big, evil, corporate company
tinyurl.com/evilairbnb - The story of how Airbnb is not loyal to hosts
tinyurl.com/airbnbevil Thanks for the tip!
try this: bit.ly/1Jryi8N
Keith:
ok, now that people can read it.. here are my comments.
There are some grammatical issues with the piece, but aside from those:
regarding "hypocracy". My answer to airbnb reps advocating for a refund is always "if airbnb refunds fees, I'll refund fees, if airbnb feels the customer should pay them they they should pay me too."
If all hosts adopt the same refund policy as airbnb has for themselves, then customer pressure will force airbnb to change. As it is, airbnb feels entitled to their fees because the guest pays them and they are advocating for the guest in some cases and hosts in others. so their logic is that they are still providing a service to the guest in helping them get a refund and should be paid for their part in the transaction.
2) guest isn't always right. You're dead on here.. the airbnb CX person should have read your check-in instructions and pointed them out to the guest.
I would insist on getting paid for this reservation...I doubt you'll have success but this actually caused an inconvenience for the guest who had to be relocated as well as the host and the CX person could have resolve it -- or the guest could learn to read.
3) airbnb mistakes.... it's not clear from your writing how your pictures were deleted or what the careless mistake was--you should be much more specific about this. was there a bug in the UI and the pictures were deleted? did they manually remove them? etc... it's important to understand how the mistake was made.
AirBnB seemingly has no QA process or people on the engineering side. so many bugs make it into production that if they have a QA team they should all be fired immediately.
I had 2 cases last year where booking requests never made it to me or my inbox. I missed out on them. months later I noticed that I had unread messages and those requests suddenly appeared AND my response rate went to 99%... I reported these errors and the lost revenue and no one seemed to care.
Since then I've actually had those reported to someone in Engineering but since those bugs are supposedly fixed, nothing can be done about the past.
4) Double Standard on response time. You're on to something here too. CX doesn't have uniform responses.. 2 calls to 2 different agents are likely to get different answers to the same problem. escalations I understand are slow and get lost. This needs fixing. I will say, from seeing what people on the groups post about calling CX, people put too much a burden on CX ... seemingly calling or emailing over minimal things.. perhaps if hosts reserved customer support calls for real issues and not just every minor little thing that comes up, they could do a better job. This doesn't mean AirBnB CX doesn't need to do better-they do, but hosts (and guests) need to do a better job of trying to resolve issues on their own and only calling for help when help is really needed.
5) Superhost support -- again, the theory behind this is that superhosts don't need to call CX for every little thing so they should only be calling for serious matters and therefor get priority. My understanding is that superhosts are given a special phone number to call (when you go through the help/resolution center to get to a phone number, the number is supposed to be different)--if you're calling some older number you found online or saved in your phone it may not be the right number. I dont actually know if they do routing based on caller id....my guess is they don't although they probably could.
One of the problems AirBnb and Uber and other "sharing economy" "transaction facilitator" companies have is that they're not actually the product they're selling. if all they do is act as a liaison between a consumer and a supplier, then both consumers and suppliers can go elsewhere pretty easily.
Drivers often drive for lyft, uber and sidecar and will switch back and fort based on what's most convenient for them at the time.
AirBnB is doing a good job of building customer loyalty and is the only company I'm aware of that even tries to give hosts any sort of consideration. While they may have a long ways to go to get better, their competition isn't doing much of anything--at some point that will change and if those companies can woo away top hosts, airbnb will be in for another uphill battle. if they're smart, they'll work to remedy that and raise the barrier to entry for competitors.
Jose
Jose:
Thanks, Keith. All good points. I apologize for the grammatical mistakes, they tend to be more common the more heated I am about a topic haha!
My takeaway from what you wrote is that I'm not alone in these issues. My objective was to get Airbnb's attention since I still have a few pending matters with them that I'd like to resolve (getting compensated for their reps mistake of accidentally deleting my pictures - I don't have any more details as to what happened here exactly either since I never got a straight explanation for it) and getting compensated for a booking that was cancelled because of my guests negligence by not reading the check in instructions and the Airbnb support's negligence in not suggesting that the guest read the check in instructions and instead offering me a 30 minute response time limit which he couldn't match himself.
It helps to share these issues, especially if I'm not alone, to bring attention to them and more importantely, to bring change.
tinyurl.com/evilairbnb