Resolution Payments: Private Video (only people with link can see)

Today we're going to be talking a little bit about the COVID ECP, which is the version that Airbnb says it applied to your canceled reservations. The COVID ECP is the one that Airbnb created in March of 2020 and started applying to your reservations moving forward. Now we argue that that's not the right version of the ECP, that the version of the ECP that you agreed to in November of 2019 is the correct version. That's the version that says endemic. Put that aside for a minute. What we're finding is even in a lot of these reservations, in a lot of these cases for a lot of these clients, that even if you accept that the COVID ECP applied, that Airbnb on some refunds misapplied their own version of the COVID ECP. So what we want to do today is to try and find admitted liability reservations. Reservations where Airbnb either admits it misapplied the COVID ECP, or which you know because you were following the bouncing ball, that in fact Airbnb misapplied the COVID ECP. And we have hosts who fought with customer support saying, the reservation was canceled on March 13th, the policy didn't go in effect till the 14th, it doesn't even fall within your own policy, why did you provide A refund. So if you know of those, right, if you know for, for a fact, or you believe that Airbnb misapplied their own COVID ECP, we want to know what those confirmation numbers are on those reservations. So today, looking at admitted liability confirmations, and what we need you to do is to help identify the reservations where Airbnb erroneously applied its own COVID ECP. And in order to do that, we're gonna, we're gonna provide you some directions. I'm gonna take you through those as well. All right. Before we get to identifying what you already know were errors because you were following the bouncing ball, if you know of any, if you don't, fine. And then also how to identify during your case when Airbnb finds an error and then sends you a resolution payment after you filed your demand for arbitration. And those are admissions by Airbnb that they screwed up. So we're going to talk about those 2 things. Before we get to that, let's give you some, some context. Okay, you can click on this link here, and this is gonna take you to a PDF download which is gonna allow you to go ahead and, and see what the East— the COVID ECP look like. And you can download that here. You can take a look at some of these screenshots. This is basically what you're going to be getting. So Airbnb came up with its March 14th, 2020 version of the COVID ECP, and the way this works is that if the following criteria are met, then Airbnb gave a refund. Our goal is to see where they gave a refund where this criteria was not met. All right. So the first thing you have to do is take a look at the cancellation date. Okay? If someone canceled on March 13th and this policy didn't even exist yet, then your cancellation policy should apply. If someone canceled on March 14th, then— okay, they canceled between March 14th and March 30th, then this is the policy, version 36, that's going to apply. Then you're going to check the reservation date. When was the reservation made? If it had to be made on or before March 14th. And then you're going to take a look at the check-in date. So the check-in date for reservations made prior to March 14th, 2020, with one night of the reservation occurring between March 14th and April 14th, would qualify for a refund. Now, you're going to see that they ultimately extended this April 14th date out again and again and again in later versions, but this version, version 36 of the COVID ECP, would apply to reservations where the check-in was between March 14th and April 14th. If all of these applied, then Airbnb gave a refund. Great. We still have our other arguments as to why that is still a breach of contract. The interesting thing is for you to find the reservations where in fact Airbnb said this criteria was met, but in fact it wasn't. And if you scroll down, you'll see the next version was March 30th, and this version applied if the cancellation date was between— not between March 14th and March 30th, but the cancellation date was between March 30th and May 1st. and the reservation was made prior to March 14th, with at least one date occurring prior to May 31st in terms of the check-in date. So let's just take a, take a couple scenarios. Let's say that the cancellation date was March 15th. In that instance, March 15th, this COVID ECP is going to apply, and the check-in date— so if they canceled on March 15th and the check-in date was on April 14th, then they should have got a refund under the COVID-19 ECP. But if they canceled on March 15th but the check-in date was April 15th, then they wouldn't have met this check-in date criteria. They should not have gotten a refund. Now, if they waited to cancel to, uh, to, uh, the end of the month, then maybe the, the policy gets changed and they would have got a refund. Doesn't matter. If they canceled on March 15th and the check-in date was after April 14th, then they did not qualify and they should not have gotten a refund. So we're seeing this area— error play out. If in fact they went to cancel between March 30th and May 1st, so let's just say April 15th, then this version of the ECP, the COVID ECP, applies. And they should get a refund under the COVID ECP if the reservation was on or before March 14th, with at least one night occurring prior to May 31st. So let's say that they cancel on April 15th, but the reservation check-in date is July 2nd, then they do not qualify for a reservation under this policy. And then you can scroll down and you can see how they change this moving forward. So they essentially moved the date, the cancellation date. If the cancellation date was between May 1st and May 13th, then this version applies, and the check-in date in this instance had to be between March 14th and June 15th. So if the cancellation date was May 1st but the check-in date was June 16th, they should not have gotten A refund. It doesn't matter that if they had just waited till May 13th, they, they, or waited to June 1st, then they would have got a refund because this now extended the date out to July 15th. Don't worry about whether or not if they would have waited. If they did not strictly qualify based on the cancellation date, and they should not have gotten a refund, under Airbnb's COVID ECP, we want to know because that's admitted liability. Admitted liability. All right, so let's take a look. First thing we want to know is known errors in applying the ECP. We have a lot of hosts who came to us and said, went to customer support, I know they screwed up under their version of the ECP, and they still wouldn't give me a refund, or they still wouldn't pay to give me my payout. Right? If you know of any errors, then tell us what those confirmation numbers are so that we can put those in a chart that are going to be admitted liability at-issue reservations. So if you've already identified reservations that you don't think should have been paid under the COVID ECP, let us know. We're going to want you to send us copies of the emails showing the reservation confirmation numbers and explaining the error you believe to have been made. So, um, if the— and the way to do that is you can go to your email, your emails, and you can do a search from airbnb.com and pull up all Airbnb emails from airbnb.com. And then you can do— you can sort the search down by reservation, cancellation, refund, etc. So in Mac, its sender is airbnb.com. Does not. So let's just do the entire message, right? So now I can see my, my cancellations. Now the reason why I'm using my inbox as opposed to the Airbnb platform is because the Airbnb platform doesn't allow you to do this type of filtering on search. But everything should be in your regular inbox. All right, so that's the known errors. If you got any, let us know. The second thing we want to talk about are resolution payments, and resolution payments are payments that they make because they know they screwed up. And so you get resolution payments also on things like the host guarantee. If there's a host guarantee claim, you'll get a resolution payment if you're— if they think that you're in the right. That type of thing. So we don't want any resolution payments here. We're going to try and identify the resolution payments that dealt with COVID refunds. All right, so what we're going to do is we're going to do a search. We're going to do a search by airbnb.com where the subject includes the word resolution, and that's going to pull up all your host guarantee resolutions, etc. But what we want you to do is to You can even filter by date because we know this is only going to be from March 1st forward, probably from March 15th forward. All right? You can do some further searching as well to see if there's any further information, but chances are you're going to have to look through each one of them. Here is a copy of an email from Airbnb saying, we're sending you a resolution payment. Now, the first thing I want you to note here is the date. This is in March. This is after this person's arbitration was filed, and during the period where Airbnb is doing discovery, they're pulling a—they're creating a spreadsheet of all the COVID refunds, and they're seeing, oh boy, we screwed up. This refund should never have been provided by customer support because it wasn't within the relevant dates for the date of cancellation, the date of check-in, etc. So, but they don't tell you that. All they do is they say, hey, here's a resolution payment. They provide no information as to that this is related to a COVID refund. They say, in fact, why you're getting paid. Payouts are occasionally held for a limited number of reasons, like if you set a minimum payment amount that isn't reached, or if extra time is needed for security checks which keep our community safe. This is fraud right here because this is not why this client got $186. The reason they got $186 is because Airbnb realized that they didn't apply the COVID refund policy correctly, that the guest did not qualify for a COVID refund. Now, the other interesting thing is they're not telling me, your attorney, that they're making these adjustments. So they're trying to hide the fact that they screwed up. They're trying to hide the admitted liability. Then they're representing to the arbitrator that they followed their ECP on the at-issue reservations when in fact they did not. All right, so refunds, right? So now you're going to do filtering by the word resolution, and word resolution is actually going to occur within the subject line of the email. Now, I didn't have any resolution payments related to, uh, to ECP or to the extenuating circumstances payment Policy, but here's what it will look like. Right? You'll get a bunch of resolution payments. You're going to have to scroll through these, see which ones are in fact potentially related to COVID refunds. The only way to do that is to go through and take a look at the at the refund, and it's going to say, "Hey, it's going to look like this." Right? You're going to say. Hmm, what is this related to? You're going to take a look at your resolution payments in the platform. You're going to find this resolution number 186. You're going to find what confirmation number it went to. Then you're going to see whether or not that was an at-issue reservation, a COVID refund reservation. If it was, we need to know the confirmation number of that reservation, right? So search your emails, sender airbnb.com, subject resolution, do a date search, and then hand scroll through those to see if any reservations are related to COVID refunds. All right, and again, this may occur as a result of your going through the discovery phase of your case, but it may have been for some other reason. Now you might get— have gotten resolution payments that occurred on COVID refunds, on COVID refunds, but you got the resolution payment before we filed your arbitration. We still want to know about those, but really we're focused on the ones that happened after you filed. All right, I hope that makes sense. We're trying to find admitted liability confirmation numbers for at-issue reservations. Follow these directions, they're step by step. If you have any issues concerning what the policy is that would have applied. You could take a look at this PDF and take a look at what the date ranges are. Find the cancellation date. That's the first step. Once you know the cancellation date, then you're gonna be able to figure out which version of the extenuating circumstances applied. And if the cancellation date was after May 1st, then you're gonna get into these charts here. If your cancellation date was June 1st, All right, this is the policy. The only difference between this and the prior ones is the check-in date had to be prior to July 15th. If it's after July 15th, then if the cancellation date was June 1st, then the person should not have gotten a refund. So that's how it works. You'll see, I'll show you really quickly all of the different versions of the ECP that there are. There's a lot of them. Right? So here is an index of all the different versions. We've just identified the ones that are most relevant in terms of how they process COVID refunds, and we've captured those in these charts. My name is Enrico Schaefer. Thank you for your help. This is really important stuff, and we'll see you next time.