Make sure your business is not reliant on airbnb

[Henry Lazerow]

Airbnb can be a great way to boost revenue, I own/manage for others and net out 30-40% higher then LTR but make sure your business is NEVER reliant on it as in the property still must cashflow positive without airbnb. Airbnb is a 3rd party and can at anytime suspend your listing or account for no valid reason. Was reading forums and thousands of hosts have been fully blocked with no issue and no explanation. I had a listing suspended due to two issues in a row *one was a bad guest and one was my fault as a lock broke. Then airbnb reactivated it but 3 months later I had a guest give a 1 star review by accident and they suspended my listing again. The guest called airbnb and deleted their 1 star review but airbnb has not responded to my appeal now 11 days later. 

Over the last 1-2 years airbnb has started to become less and less host friendly. You can see their shift in changing host cancellation fees from $100 to now a % ratio which is usually several hundred dollars and can even be over $1000. There are also some common scams going on now where if a guest does not like a place they put a dirty face mask behind a bed and send a photo to airbnb. They also will claim they smell smoke from cigarettes. Airbnb will always allow cancellation for this. The smoke one I had happen to me first hand and have heard about the new facemask trick going around on a few forums.

To have your entire account permanently banned a guest only needs to say that you verbally sexually harassed, threatened them or called them a racial slur. This does not need to be in writing and can be verbal. Airbnb is a huge company which has enough customers they do not care if it's true or not, they do not want to take the risks and would rather lose a host. 

Just a word of warning for fellow BP members never give all the power to a 3rd party company over your income!