AirBnB bans host for knowing the wrong people, without disclosing who the wrong person was, denies appeals with cookie cutter mails (“after careful consideration”) every time.
This is some boringdistopia shit. Some bot damn near ruins a family and won’t even tell them why.
No, a family that could not afford to own a second home bought one and then couldn’t profit from it.
exactly. The housing market already sucks for people to be buying a 2nd house specifically to use as AirBnB to profit
They couldn’t profit from it because of a bot. That issue is going to get more widespread and someone you know will be affected by it.
I think that maybe the lesson I’m learning in these last few years (through the misadventures of others), is that trusting platforms with your livelihood is not a very good idea. It’s just too fragile.
I’m OK to use them as a tool, but whatever business I build must be able to survive suddenly losing access.
As someone who can’t afford to buy even one home (and barely can afford to pay rent), I don’t really sympathize with people who buy multiple homes, just to rent them out. However, sympathy or not, it’s still not okay how AirBnB handled the situation. Just because I don’t really care for the reason that they have a second home that they want to rent out, doesn’t mean that they should be treated inhumanely. Two “wrongs” don’t make a right, and frankly, even if I have little sympathy for people who choose to own multiple homes, it’s not inherently wrong. At least they planned to use it for a purpose for themselves part of the time, which is more than I can say for people or companies that just buy up homes exclusively to rent out (with no intention of ever utilizing it for a practical personal purpose). And frankly, if AirBnB treats them like this, who’s to say it couldn’t treat anyone else like this, be it a renter or host? I’m sure we’ve all dealt with being mistreated by customer “support” at various companies, and it’s not something anyone likes, and it’s certainly not okay to send canned responses that are likely flat out lies. I bet they never did an investigation at all until these people went public. And if it’s really “humans” on the other end of the emails, I’m sure it’s just people hired to copy/paste set phrases into an email and hit “send”. Not people who are meant to actually look into issues and personally respond. The issue I’m seeing is that AirBnB’s “response” to these people is part of a societal flaw that, in this case, hurt people who maybe some people might not feel sympathy for, and maybe rightly so. However, as this can happen to anyone (be it with AirBnB or any other of the many many companies that have similarly shitty customer service), it’s a terrible precedent to be setting, that can hurt all of us.
