Marketplace Standards Violation: VRBO/HomeAway keeps messing up!

[Kevin Lefeuvre]

Yesterday in my morning emails I saw this lovely message for VRBO:

Needless to say I have no attempt of getting the guests info.
Under "Take Action" among options I could declare this as an error and asked the "standards violation team" to look into it.
Didn't hear until mid day, when I decided to call the customer service.
Spent almost an hour with the rep whose conclusion was that I have a language in my listing which in a nutshell asks my guests to avoid an instant booking without telling me a bit about themselves: Who they are, where they come from, purpose of visit, etc.  I repeat that for dog owners to first tell me about the weight and the breed of the dog before booking. I thought this COULD NOT BE THE REAL REASON and that she was wasting my time and asked to talk to her supervisor.

Another hour spent with the supervisor, she had a different diagnostic after a long review : she referred to the same section but said It's because I implicitly DISCOURAGE my guests to use the instant booking! She said the rep was wrong! I told her if she knows that on the owner dashboard, even when instant booking is on, their platform prints pop-ups or big highlighted messages encouraging the hosts to activate instant booking and get more bookings. She said that was not true!!! And recommended I deactivate instant booking!!!

What do you want to do with irrational and ignorant employees/supervisors who know their product less than us hosts?

Hopeless and frustrated, I told her I am going to reword the language but keep the instant booking. She wrote down all the interactions in her CRM. I asked how can I get confirmation that the new language is acceptable by their engines. She said she sees in CRM I have asked the "standards violation team" to take a look, so they'll get back to me. Call terminated.

This morning I received this message:

Having to rely on these guys is the riskiest part of our business.

I thought sharing this here can make your life less stressful if you receive a similar message.