An owner gave us feedback and made this statement.
The owner said:
I think your current contract is skewed towards Airbnb needs and thus biased against the owners.
This is a critical concern that I want to share with all owners and hosts using Airbnb (but let’s not focus on the tall tree alone. Booking.com is far worse).
I do understand the concern. And agree.
The bad news is we live in utopia.
In general, I mean.
We tend to trust everyone. And that keeps the good people sane.
But businesses, big corporates more, tend to maximise income at the expense of something.
Airbnb, may not even know how they screw the host. They do NOT only do an exceptional job of screwing they also bring us very many paying guests. But when things go wrong their true colours shine through.
Our intention with the T&Cs is to share ALL these risks.
Using Airbnb; we pay a price for their dominance (bias against owner = host etc).
And we have an obligation to inform owners about this bias.
In the past, we kept these risks to ourselves hoping the impact is not part of our path but surprise surprise we got burned. And owners had to carry the brunt. Carrying the brunt is not the issue. Being surprised is the issue. Our T&Cs shares the Airbnb bias (even if we don’t like it).
We can only reduce the bias (host, owner, agent) by direct bookings. In the meantime, we are transparent when it comes to bad news.
BTW: We never really told owners of extenuating circumstances. We just said Airbnb T&Cs apply. But that was not fair. When we paid and owner R161 000 they had to pay back because of extenuating circumstances is not the kind of surprise we want to share with you post the incident. No. It’s transparent. You know what you are getting into.
Therefore:
“Our Terms & Conditions rather turn you down today before we fail you tomorrow.
