An AWFUL experience with Airbnb

Through my colleague Veronica's invitation and introduce, I started using Airbnb. At first she only wanted to invite me for the reward money and I only wanted to do her a favor to accept it. But when it came to planning my trip to Japan, with so much exposure to its advertisement, I wanted to use it too. Along the disaster came.

Veronica told me that her account was disabled when she was first browsing the home stays available in Tokyo without even getting contacted with the landlords. Back then I was think she must have done something wrong. She told me she registered another account to try but was disabled again. I didn't try to dig into what happened actually because I believed a big well known service company as Airbnb should have a mature system to solve people's account problems. Until it happened to me.

When I decided which days I would stay in Tokyo, I started checking the hotel prices in Tokyo which was pretty expensive. So I tried Airbnb. I used my only-for-a-favor account but it was disabled before when Veronica wanted to log into my account to search for rooms. Then I started another account with my Sina Weibo, within 10 minutes it was disabled. In Chinese, the way they say disabled is not like this polite way, it is a word slightly different from FORBIDDEN.

For sure I asked for help from Weibo, but there was maybe a robot replying all the messages in the same way asking me to send an email to the service account or call the customer service line. I immediately called but the system couldn't identify my phone number for twice so I didn't even get a chance to talk to a customer service staff. Then I sent an email to the email provided by Airbnb Weibo robot. Mine said below:

I said, dear customer service staff, I had two accounts been disabled and I really want to know why. Then I provided my account information which might be useful for them to get access. I got a reply like this below:

So let me translate it. Basically it was saying that because I violated some regulation in the link which I can't even open, my account was disabled accordingly. I wanted to know which regulation I violated, thus I sent another email here:

So I got the answer here:

It's saying: We can't support your account any more, and WE decided by OURSELVES to disable(FORBID) your account according to OUR regulations. We are NOT obligated to explain anything we did, please understand. In addition, we don't have any legal liability to our conduct of disabling or cancelling your account. Airbnb has the full capacity to make any final decision of anything relevant, and this decision is IRREVERSIBLE. If there is any change in future, we will contact you, but before that we can NOT help on anything relevant to your account problem. Please go to the website to get more information.

It is exactly the same email my colleague Veronica got. The Chinese tone is more dictating and impolite which made me suddenly think I was living in North Korea or maybe some ancient dynasty with an emperor talking to me. As a head hunter in marketing for 6 years before, I can see how much money Airbnb invested or keeps investing in marketing in China. But if the product remains like this, I don't see a future. 

Maybe there are other people happily using it travelling all over the world, but Veronica and I won't use it any more. Life is hard itself we don't want some customer service staff from a huge service company makes us feel like nothing. If you don't believe it, please please go and check it.

When I published this actually Veronica was using it, the tragic part is she managed to pay for some home stays with one account but was disabled again before she got the land lord information.

I thought I should have put more of my time digging into gender equality and send more articles about it, but I just got a bit irritated.

Welcome to comment on me or Airbnb.