When An OTA Bans You - A Host's Story of Resilience and Reinvention

March 19th. Actually, one of our clients sent me a message like, hey, I can't find our Airbnb listing. I'm like, well that's weird. So I log into our account and all our listings are suspended. So it's what they call a shadow ban, I guess. And my mind immediately went back to like two months prior when we had a guy stay at our house and we became suspicious after the fact that there was some sex trafficking going on. Horrible. So Airbnb policy says that if there's any kind of sexual violations like that, that and this is. They're pretty much verbatim. I think that you should report it to Airbnb.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect, you'll better put direct. Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

Welcome back to the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast gives hosts the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly, the conf can go out there and get yourselves direct bookings. We do a miniseries where we dive behind hosts who have got interesting stories and people who have run successful short term rental or hospitality businesses. And today we've got a special guest who's going to come on and talk about his story. And I'm excited to dive into this because this is something which will strike fear into some. But actually once you know about how to deal with things like what we're going to be talking about today, then you much better equipped as an entrepreneur and as a, as, as a business owner. So let's welcome along our guest today we've got Elam King. Did I pronounce that right?

Elam King.

Yam King.

Not Elam Queen, Not Elam Prince. Elam King.

I love it. So we've got Elam here and he's going to be talking to us about a particular story which happened. So Elam, usually I'd go into a, A, you know, sort of a business pitch and stuff like that. But before we go into that, what would you like people to take away from this, this episode Today?

I guess we're talking about what happened in our business and it's started about four months ago and just one thing after another went kind of sideways and one of those was getting kicked off the Airbnb platform. So there's a lot of like standard advice that people will get, like diversify. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, you know, maybe have a direct booking channel. And frankly, that was one of the things I wanted to work on more. We had it, but I wanted to work on more. On it more. Yeah. So there's, there's a lot of, like, standard business advice that people are gonna, that people will give. Another thing is don't build your business on someone else's business, you know, and it's true. Airbnb hosts, you know, kind of working for Airbnb.

Can you give us like an elevator pitch of, of your business before that? Like, what does your. Where is your business based? Give us the, the kind of rundown of, of what your business looks like.

Or looked like at the height. We're probably operating like 20 properties, doing a little bit over a million in revenue per year in eastern usa, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Amish country. Actually, I actually grew up Amish, so I got that in my, in my blood. And ironically, just before the blow up, I started talking quite a bit more about the company to people and, and what the vision is. I got super clear with the vision, and that was to design a hospitality brand that ignites people's souls. And what I mean by that is so often in hospitality, we look at it as like a bed and, and, and maybe breakfast. Now we talk about experience, we talk about, you know, whatever. Although the word experience in a lot of ways has kind of gotten kind of become cliche, I think. I kind of like, don't like the word, but I don't have a better one. So. But anyway, back to that. You know, we often look at hospitality as like a bed, studying with a bed, definitely, you know, then, you know, you tack on maybe breakfast for some people and maybe you tack on experience, whereas what I was looking at so ignite people's souls. So we have, we are much, much more than our physicality. We also have a soul. We have feelings, we have issues, we have joys, we have sorrows, we have pains, you know, whatever. There's so much more to us as a human race than what first meets the eye. And my goal was to continue to develop our hospitality brand to where we give people, and here's the word again, experience. An experience of a lifetime. An experience that actually helps them come to grips with maybe some of their problems. So maybe you're a stressed out CEO or whatever. I'm just using example, and you have some issues that you're working with and you can't. You just, like, you just need time away and you need an environment where that stress can Go away, you can think again, you can actually find solutions, you can come to grips with maybe your inner self and just, you know, different things like that. So that's, that's where I was like looking to take the company.

What did you do before hospitality? How did you, how did you get started in this business?

Funny thing is our first house, this was seven years ago, it's all but seven years ago that we bought our first house. And before that I had kind of started looking in the real estate or, or I barely knew the word real estate. Buying a house I had no experience in, in real estate, I'd experience in the trades, but not real estate. So I was like, I'd like to buy a house that becomes an asset, not a liability. House hacking, right? And I didn't have that clear thinking back then. It was just, that's how I phrase it now. You know, it's like, oh, that's what I was doing. In other words, I wanted a house that, you know, pays its own bills. And I forget exact wording out of my head, but that's what I wanted to do. And so we found a seven bedroom house in LA City. We're actually living in lexer city at the time. This is Lecture City, Pennsylvania, not Lexer City, uk. But anyway, so we found the seven bedroom house and it had three exterior doors and so we, and it was a complete mess. We, we, yeah, we completely redid the inside. And so then what we did is we closed a couple doors because township or the city wouldn't allow us to just build walls wherever we wanted to. But we would close doors and put up bookcases and do different things like that. And we ended up making it three apartments. We lived in one and then we rented the other two out. And the house paid for itself very, very well, very nicely. And then we sold it almost a year ago and made a really handsome profit on that as well. So we got into that and then it's like, oh, well this works. And then we got an arbitrage. First one was my brother in law's house. They were moving elsewhere for season. It's like, well, okay, I mean I'll pay your rent for it, I'll pay you rent. And if you let us use a short term rental. I didn't know what rental arbitrage was back then. I didn't. Year or two later I found, oh, that's what you call that? Okay, so that's how we got into it. And then eventually it's like, wait, we have a business and Then we just kept growing it and then eventually got into management, managing for other people, so forth.

So I kind of get the. The business before the event that we're going to talk about, and I kind of get what has got you into it. So let's dive into. To what actually happened. Take us back to, first of all, when was it and what happened?

Yeah, so March 19th. A forever famous, infamous day in the history of the company. Right? March 19th. Actually, one of our clients sent me a message like, hey, I can't find our Airbnb listing. I'm like, well, that's weird. So I log into our account and all our listings are suspended. So it's what they call shadow ban, I guess. And I'm like, what? And my mind immediately went back to like two months prior when we had a guy stay at our house and we became suspicious after the fact that there was some sex trafficking going on. Horrible. I mean, I cringe just like mentioning it. So Airbnb policy says that if there's any kind of, you know, sexual violations like that, that. And this is. They're pretty much verbatim. I think that you should report it to Airbnb. I don't know if it's quite verbatim, but that's clearly the idea. So I did that. So they took us down.

That's crazy, isn't it? So. So you've done the right thing. You've seen something which shouldn't be happening. And I've got to be honest, I mean, as. As hosts and those of you who are listening to this will know exactly what. What I'm talk. There are times you suspect there's something which is happening in your properties which shouldn't be happening. So you've done the right thing, been responsible, you've reported it, and how have they repaid you? They've taken you down. So they've done that shadow band and.

Yeah, well, okay, so. So let me back up. When we got to shadow ban on March 19, my mind went back to this incident two months earlier, which I was just talking about, right? And now they just took a listing down. They didn't take the whole account down.

Got it.

Now, the weird thing is, what really. What really ticked me off then with them was they then later called me or message, no message me, and said, hey, we have completed the investigation. We need you to change the wording, disclosing your cameras.

Okay?

So they were.

They were more concerned about the cameras than the violation.

Here's what I think was the issue. They didn't find anything wrong. So they had to have something, something so that they can get my listing back up. They had a reason to accuse me of something, so they made something up. And it was like, you need to put in your listing. That it. Their cameras are recording 24 7. One, they're not. Two, I don't have to say that. Yeah, I have to disclose that they're there and where they are. That's all. That's all your policy. And I agree with them, but it's like, whatever, okay. And I told him, I told the persons, I said, look, I'm going to do what you say, but then as soon as we're done, I'm going to change it back to the way it was. I mean, I was that brazenly honest with it. Thanks for putting my listing back up.

Yeah, they just need a reason to put it back up. But I mean, the fact that they've got the. The control over one of your listings, like that is. Is frustrating. Right? You know, like as in it's just. And also the lac. No, you know, if somebody said, hey, thanks for reporting this, by the way. We've noticed this isn't on your listing. So unless you change it, we're going to give you three days to change. You know, we're going to then take down your listings. It's the fact they did it before communicating, you know, which isn't good. Thank you so much for sharing your story on the Boostly podcast. Thank you two for listening to this episode. As I say, if you do want to reach out to Elam, if you want to add to his network there, then you can do with the notes around in the show, make sure that you're building your business on your land. Make sure you're diversifying amongst the jerks, amongst the OTAs that we said about. So that that's definitely memorable. And yeah, really take action on this. So thank you so much. That's goodbye from me on this podcast.

Yep.

We'll see you on the next one.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee. Like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.