An educated guess of how many hosts there are on Airbnb as we speak is: 710,00 with 2,100,000 separate listings. In 200 countries. In 34,000 cities throughout the world.
Of course its impossible to keep track manually, but there should be some kind of program that detects relisitngs without any reviews.
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OMG, Mearns, I want to stay on your mini-island! Awesome listing!!!
Looks like youâre booked solid until April 2018! Good for you! Thatâs my birthday month. Iâm going to try to figure out how I can make it work.
I just did a google search for the number of Airbnb customer service employees and this is the only statistic I could find:
At the 2015 Airbnb Open, Mark Levy (Global Head of Employee Experience) shared the following numbers:
â˘Number of offices: 21 all over the world
â˘Headcount: 2368 people*
â˘Hired in 2015: 1160 people
Hi @sandy2,
Wow, thatâs one fast growing company. And Airbnb is quite coy about statistics. Which is why I asked Mearns.
Yes, but if you combine that with Mearnsâ numbers, it seems like too few employees for the volume of customers and hosts they have. If you look on Airbnbâs official Facebook page, the comments rarely respond to the picture of some great place they are featuring; 90%+ comments are complaints about customer service and other glitches in their system. That page is killing Airbnbâs reputation. Often, someone who has never used Airbnb will post that after reading about all the CS issues, they have been scared away. Thatâs a problem for all of us.
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Hi @sandy2,
Or maybe opportunity for a competitor with better technical skills and customer service, assuming that is possible. Though Airbnb now has the network advantage. Regardless, thereâs nothing stopping people from listing on multiple sites at once, so Airbnb doesnât have a lock in. I wonder if they realise that. The problem right now is the competition ranges from mediocre to terrible.
I think the âAirbnb modelâ (for lack of a better term) is quite effective. After that, itâs a question of execution.
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How did he get away with only 2 ID verifications?
Besides the lousy reviews, the photos look good, too bad the guests couldnât upload photos.
Hosts used to be able to send a PM to Airbnb about guests, that feature is no longer available, I specifically wanted to use it because for the first time ever a guest completed their review in front of me. What shocked me was when she got to value, she said I think youâre a 3 in value. I asked her if she knew how much hotel rooms are in Cody and did she see people were charging the same for a wall tent, you would have to find your way to the house in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and the shower. She said, Oh, theyâre paying for the experience. OMG! Canât wait to see how Airbnb dings me on that one, especially after I gave her a discount on an extra day, through Airbnb of course although she wanted to do it privately, no way! And did a load of washing which I never do! No good deed goes unpunished!
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Hi @amywyo,
I donât understand what you mean. You can contact Airbnb any time you want about anything. And you can certainly do it privately. E.g. Private Twitter message to #AirbnbHelp.
In particular, when posting a guest review, the last screen says - do you want to tell Airbnb anything about this guest?, or something to that effect.
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As I was trying to explain the last 10 reviews didnât offer that option anymore. So youâre right you have to contact Airbnb and last time I did that with a questionable reservation request ID verification, they werenât very helpful. IMHO
But every time I call I get different responses, usually very good, helpfull & supportive.
Strange. Every review I have written has had that option (commenting privately to Airbnb about the guest). The last one was only last week - my guests are pretty short stay.
I still have that on my reviews. Hopefully this is a temporary test that will fail and they will bring it back for everyone. You do mean this screen?
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OK. I have now spoken to someone at Air BNB neither helpful nor bright.
I have 8 reviews. 2 were 3 star, the rest some combination of 4 and 5. The average as shown on my listing, is 4 stars.
She is unable to tell me why, but did tell me who the guests were that gave me 3 stars.
Here are their comments visible to me:
-
Marthaâs hose is spacious and in walking distance to (local attractions). are large and on 3rd floorwith a squeaky staircase. The kitchen and living room are spacious and shared with owners son.
-
Martha and Brianâs house is charming and perfectly situated to attend a performance in the park. The weather was very hot and there is no central air heat was unbearable during the day. Brian was very gracious welcoming us.
As I have mentioned the Air Con is NOT shown as an amenity and was mentioned to most guests. Ceiling fans an table fans are provided. The shared nature of the house is spelled out in the listing and in every communication.
I have attempted to have this escalated and hope to hear back from a supervisor as to what was said.
On looking at the site I see that if I change to âsharedâ I can only list one room and indicate it sleeps 6! This will not attract the guests I want in my house.
As stated, we have 3 bedrooms and a full private bath on a separate floor of our house. Not technically a private space, but way more private than a bedroom accommodating 5 people!!
Very frustrated. May have to use a different booking site next spring.
This thread has become so clogged with horror stories about bad listings, that I feel quite offended and am going to pull back now.
Sorry you arenât getting the answers you need. The consensus here seems to be that airbnb, flawed as it is, is better than anything else unless you have a whole house rental. Hopefully they will add more options in the filters to make it more obvious to people what they are getting. I know there are other hosts here who have the same set up so it can be done. Have a safe and restful off season.
Crest Inn also gets crucified and a solid 1 star on trip advisor. Is Airbnb really that desperate to take an ad for a property like that and suspends a normal listing because people canât read that it is a shared (not private) listing in Canada with no A/C. Oops, listed as private and itâs shared?
Hi @Martha,
An option, as discussed elsewhere on this site, probably in multiple places, is to track your guest ratings yourself. Then when you get a low rating, you could contact your guest yourself and ask. Itâs possible in some cases itâs a mistake. Someone said the Airbnb app was more likely to register the wrong number of stars. Thatâs happened to me at least once.
If the guest didnât mean it, you can possibly get Airbnb to change it. If the guest did mean it, itâs possible you can change their minds.
Anyway, if you donât have many reviews, thatâs a reasonable thing to do. Though itâs not clear how much ratings actually affect bookings. But Airbnb seems to care about them, at least. Judging by reports here.
Also, have you mentioned NO air conditioning in a prominent place in your listing? If not, I would do so.
Back. Here is another link that is partially up to date: http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/airbnb-statistics/
The point is, imagine running this little empire. To me is it a miracle they run as good as they do., especially since they are growing so fast.
Thanks Sandy2 for your kind comments.