Tim Hubbard's Airbnb listings across three cities got blocked after he missed an email about the discrimination policy covering service animals. He lost a week of bookings before recovering. He recommends monitoring support emails closely, creating backup accounts, and listing on multiple platforms like VRBO and Booking.com.
Questions this video answers
November 14 and 15 (year not specified in the chunk).
Over 15,000 guests.
A missed Airbnb support email about their discrimination policy after a guest (with a claimed service animal) was denied; the guest filed a claim which led to Airbnb blocking the calendars.
Chapters
So Airbnb took down all of my listings recently. I want to share with you what happened, how I lost, who knows, thousands of dollars, and how you can prevent this from happening to you. Stay tuned. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. Quick, actionable ideas to help you along your real estate investment journey, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Welcome back, everyone, to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Happy you're here. As always, we've got another topic. Quick, quick, actionable advice. And this week, I'm hoping this saves you from this ever happening to you. I lost thousands of dollars this week. It's actually. It's hard to calculate exactly how much I lost because Airbnb took down all of my listings. They didn't actually take them down, per se, but they blocked them on the calendar. So let's jump right in. I wanna tell you what happened. I wanna tell you how we fixed it and how you can prevent this. And then also some diversification strategies so that we're not so reliant on Airbnb. So this just happened to me, and with little notification whatsoever. Actually, all we received was an email. No phone call, no nothing. And of course, we get hundreds, thousands of emails from Airbnb all the time because of our guest reservations. The guest reservations get pooled into our management system, so those aren't overlooked. But. But a lot of times the support emails from Airbnb go into those same boxes. And unfortunately, we overlooked one email. And that one email was responsible for all my listings coming down in three different cities. So this is what happened in a nutshell. Airbnb has a discrimination policy, and that also includes discrimination against service animals.
So if someone has a service animal and they have the paperwork for it, even though you may have a no pet policy at your property, if you deny that guest, they can file a claim and it can result in what just happened to me. I unfortunately did not know about it. The only way I found out about it was a housekeeper messaged me and said, hey, I can't find your listings on Airbnb. And I said, oh, that's weird. You know? So I pulled up the app, I looked in, and I, you know, everything's fine. I sent her a link. Here they are. And then a couple days later, another housekeeper messaged me in a different city. She said, your listings are not popping up on Airbnb. So now this is two different cities. So I looked into it more, and it had turned out that Airbnb blocked our calendar. They didn't notify us on our Dashboard. They didn't call us. They didn't do anything, really, other than one email that that said, you need to respond back that you agree to our discrimination policy, otherwise your listings will be removed on this date. Unfortunately, we didn't see that email, and without notice, they're all gone. So hard to say, actually, how much we lost. And I hate that I scared our team. They didn't have work. The following week was much slower because most of our reservations happen within seven days and our calendar was blocked for seven days. So huge, huge impact. I want to make sure this does not happen to you guys. So I've got some practices and things that we can implement to make sure it doesn't happen. First of all, we want to have a good eye on our support emails. Ours were getting forwarded to a spot which we didn't view regularly, so we fixed that. Any support emails in the future, we will see much, much easier and quicker. But then the second thing is, as this was happening and I wasn't getting through to Airbnb support, that there's no phone support for this discrimination section of their support team. It's all done through email. So I called and I called, you know, trying to escalate it, and spent hours on the phone, really, with Airbnb. And like many big companies that have big support teams, every time you call, you get a different answer. So it was really frustrating. Open support tickets, and they got closed randomly. And then ultimately we got an email that said, thank you for responding. We unblocked your list, and so keep an eye on those support emails. But one thing that I've changed since then, and it's almost kind of good that this happened, is that I'm creating multiple Airbnb accounts now, so they're not. All the eggs aren't in one basket. Our property management software that we use allows us to integrate with multiple Airbnb accounts. So it's not a big deal from an operational standpoint. The one downside is that if you already have existing listings and you take them off an account and you put them under a new account, then. Then you're gonna lose all your reviews, and you gotta start over in that sense. But I'm taking down properties that didn't have as great a reviews as the other ones, cleaning them up a little more, and we're just starting fresh that way. We're gonna be diversified a little bit. So that's one thing you can do. Well, first of all, make sure that you're checking your support emails or they're getting forwarded to the appropriate place. That's number one. Number two, you can have multiple Airbnb accounts, and I highly suggest this if you have quite a few properties, because who knows, one day Airbnb can shut your account down and it's, you know, has big impacts, obviously. So that's number two. And number three is diversifying into different channels. And now we're already on VRBO and HomeAway. But I've. Since this happened, I've added booking.com and I'm still going through that. We talked in the past about having a channel manager, and that allows us to manage all these different calendars at the same time with ease, so we don't have to mark one booked and mark one reserved and unblock one. So it's not going to be that difficult from an operational standpoint to add a whole nother channel. And booking.com gets 10 times the amount of traffic as Airbnb. However, it is a slightly different guest. You just need to monitor it closely as your new guests are coming in and make sure that you're meeting all their expectations. So that's three things. Want to make sure we're monitoring support emails? Let's open multiple accounts if we can. If you have a lot of properties, I highly, highly suggest it. It would have saved me thousands of dollars. In this case, just over a week. And then number three, let's diversify, make sure we're on at least those three channels. If you missed the episode prior we talked about channel managers. We'll put it in the show notes. I think it was episode 25, but we'll talk about that and how we can make it so it's not cumbersome. Now, let's get to the actual issue here, the discrimination. We obviously do not disc against anyone. We have a no pet policy, and one of our housekeepers denied a guest because of allergies and not, she doesn't like cleaning the apartments that have pets in them. And that person filed a claim, and that's the email that we missed. And that was the reason for shutting it down. But, you know, after talking to some other hosts, Airbnb's no discrimination policy against pets, it counts for anything. I mean, if you had a hog or a horse that had a service animal title, you have to let that animal in your property. We got to be really careful because Airbnb spends millions, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars on advertisement. That's why we can get so many bookings through there. So we just have to be cognizant of this, we definitely can require the service animal papers so that we know it's an actual service animal, but just keep that in mind. I don't want this to happen to you guys. It was really stressful. I'm glad that it's over. I think it was a great learning lesson to diversify our Airbnb accounts and to make sure on multiple channels and just to monitor some support emails and things a little more closely. So please, please consider those ideas if you have, especially if you have a large portfolio. This is one of those things that it's like insurance. You know what I mean? Having multiple Airbnb accounts. We don't need it until it happens. So something happens. So just really, really consider that. Hopefully that helped. Hopefully this has never happened to you, and hopefully your listings are staying booked. So until next time, I hope you have a wonderful day.
Well, you guys have been asking for it, and I am so excited to announce that we have the dates paid picked out for our virtual event. Yep. November 14th and 15th. Coming up, we're gonna cover everything we did in our two previous live events, but because of the times, we're going virtual and I couldn't be more excited, you're gonna get all the same info, the systems, the processes, the tools, and the secrets that I've learned managing now over 15, 000 guests in multiple cities and earning millions in passive income. Head over to restmethods.com forward/virtual to SA. Looking forward to seeing you in just a few short weeks.
