Airbnb Shut Me Down

The Rant…

So, my neighbor calls Airbnb, tells them he feels unsafe and Airbnb shuts my listing down with no warning! Crazy right? We received a message in the middle of the night saying essentially, “Your listing has been shut down and we may even cancel all your upcoming reservations…pending a safety review”.

WTF! How is it that this company has so much control and frankly is so quick to judge their hosts? We have been on their site for about a decade, host around 60 properties and we don’t even get a courtesy call!

The Back Story…

My neighbor doesn’t like that we turned our home into an STR. He feels “unsafe living in his home and fears for his family”. Who am I to judge, I mean he has more of a chance to be harmed walking into a 7-11 than he does by my guests. Anyway, to set the tone the homes in this neighborhood are 2+ acre lots in a higher-end area; so not in the hood. At 5:30 PM he calls me saying there was a party, but there was not. All people at the home not sleeping there departed by 7:30 PM. Long story short, he calls Airbnb and complains about something and now I have to wait over 2 weeks to get reactivated.

The Problem…

My beef really isn’t with my neighbor, he will just have to move because it won’t be shutting down anytime soon! LOL, The problem here is with Airbnb. I get it, as a business owner, they are a business and following procedure. Unfortunately, the Airbnb employees that most hosts deal with are just robots and follow verbatim their policies. But what the hell, no common sense, maybe call the host first?? I’m a customer, without hosts, there would be no housing for guests. (Again the common sense) Well, 2 weeks later we finally got reactivated. But, not until after talking with a representative that could give a shit, made us feel like criminals, and would give us no information on the situation.

The Solution…

The moral of this story and something we are working on in our management business is not to be so reliant on these big hosting companies. If they wanted to, they could severely harm my management company by turning off all of our listings, that’s too much control. As a business owner and STR investor, you need to protect your assets and income. If you're not doing these items, I’d suggest starting:

• Be listed on multiple sites, ie. VRBO, Booking.com, Expedia, etc.

• Start Driving Direct Booking traffic

  • If you are not a manager, look into building a property landing page or website for your homes.

  • Start marketing your properties & website to drive traffic. Some ideas are consistent posts/videos on Facebook, Instagram, Tic Toc, or YouTube, you can try organically or use paid ads.

  • Consider paid SEO.

  • Create a Google My Business page and you could even look into Google ads/PPC.

  • Create a monthly email newsletter and email all your past guests

    • Also, look into ways to capture all your Airbnb/VRBO guest emails.

If you are like me and some of this is just tedious, time-consuming, or too technical, look at sites like Fiverr and Upwork, you can find anyone to do anything for an affordable price.

Do you really need Airbnb? Sure maybe for now, but build a loyal following and you won’t for long. Something to ponder.

STR Spoof…