welcome back Airbnb family. Today we're talking about guest experiences
and some statistics that you need to know about as a host so you can be the
best host ever I'm doing this video because Brian Chesky did a host Q&A
about a week ago where he made some statements that were in a quite positive
spin about the platform but you kind of need to know the whole story because you
need to respond to guests empathetically because some guests have had some bad
experiences and you didn't know you need to know why and when and where so Brian
Chesky said that point zero zero four percent of all reservations but that's a
very small number have a serious occurrence or serious incident but by
serious we're talking like murder assault home burning down things like
that where nick shapiro told inc calm in an interview maybe a couple years ago
that 75% of guests leave a review and 90% of those are positive so what that
boils down to is you have two point five percent of reservations that have a
neutral or negative review but there's also 25% of all guests who don't say
anything and we all know the occurrence where a guest didn't have a good stay
they might had a problem but they felt like they could address it with the host
directly and tell the host privately instead of leaving a negative review or
leaving a review at all so that means that it's not just simply 2.5%
well it came across a blog and that blog was called asher and lyric i'm gonna
leave the link in the description below and that blog they did some independent
research and of course it's cited in the blog i'm gonna share but they did some
research and they found that 3 to 7% of all states have a negative occurrence or
negative experience and so they break down why these experiences happen so it
wasn't really far from what nick Shapiro said it's worse than of course what nick
said but not that much worse so here are the six main reasons why people have a
negative experience and then we're gonna talk about customer service - okay so
number one the biggest one is that 20% of guests twenty point five percent of
guests experience a host canceling the reservation within 24 hours of their
arrival that's a big number let me give you context I have about
forty seven active properties I have on average eight to thirteen stays per
property per month as long as it's not a monthly booking and I'd say that over
ten percent of our properties are booked multi month right so let's wipe them so
let's say forty properties with an average of 10 stays per month that's 400
stays so if you have 20% of guests who have a cancellation that's the reason
why they had a bad experience and between 3 to 7% that's five percent on
average of guests having a bad experience well that means 1% of all
reservations somebody gets cancelled within 24 hours or less well we have 400
reservations a month which means on average we should be cancelling by
accident four stays a month and we don't okay so this means that there are hosts
out there who do this with greater frequency so I am a professional house
this what we do so that's one of those things that don't happen to us because
of course we never have those those issues because we don't live in the home
or you know we've kind of got our flow down but there are a lot of new hosts or
novice hosts or people hosting like illegally or without permission and they
get caught and then they have to cancel their reservations and are told they
can't host anymore I think that's where most of that's coming from okay so if
you're a good host that's an experience that you don't have to worry about but
there's also a positive which is Airbnb tries to solve it by putting those
guests in another Airbnb listing they want to keep the guests on the platform
so I'm sure plenty of you have gotten calls the same way that we have saying
we would like you to take this guest in tonight do you have availability we see
your calendars open do you have it so by not dropping your prices crazy low all
the time and by having some open availability the day of you might get a
call from Airbnb saying that we need to place this guest so that happens
sometimes another stat the lowest one is that 1.1 percent of guests feel
discriminated that their experience experience was discrimination there was
something on the news lately that um that african-american guests got stopped
by the police on the way out of their Airbnb booking because somebody in the
neighborhood decided that those people looked sketchy I don't know if it's the
same one but I read about another one where Bob
Marley's granddaughter was discriminated against and so if there was two of them
that happened that would be absolutely wild another one is over 15 percent of
guests get scammed by their hosts now this probably happens more in places
like New York or overseas where I've actually heard about this one in New
York where during special events or like peak seasons somebody will create an
Airbnb account right and they'll make this listing and it looks great and then
some reason they get that guest to pay them off of Airbnb for the listing right
they do some sort of you know fraud on Airbnb get somebody interested in the
place they take a payment off booking or off you know off the platform where
they're no longer protected then then they show up and there's no property
well Airbnb doesn't know that guest anything because the person really
didn't book on Airbnb so Airbnb is not going to come save the day that's that's
pretty crazy one another one is that the listing was
inaccurate so over 12% of guests claimed that the listing was inaccurate and just
in some way right it didn't have a king-size bed when it said it had a
king-size bed it doesn't have a washer or dryer or the washer dryer doesn't
work you know there's things like that you know there there's a TV but there's
absolutely no cable no streaming no internet for the TV it's just a TV
there's things like that that guests get really upset about or there weren't the
amenities that they advertised like the pool now this happened to us where the
pool was getting worked on at one of our properties and the guest showed up and
they couldn't use the pool because the pool was under maintenance and they got
upset about it so that's one of those things that you really don't have a lot
of control over but you have to be careful and then a small percentage like
three point three percent of guests claimed that the listing was completely
fake or non-existent kind of like the whole scam thing so again you know these
are things that guests go through so the moral of the story on all these is that
with the the fact that 3 to 7 percent of all reservations have a negative
experience and there's so many bookings on Airbnb per month is there such a high
amount of volume that the the presence of negativity is known and it's real and
people about it and so even if a guest has
negative experience they're still gonna book again um unless it's really really
bad they're still going to use the platform hopefully but they're gonna
have that once bitten twice shy kind of thing so if you if you have a guest that
is lacking patience or goodwill it's probably because you know they've had
another bad experience on Airbnb and I've had guests kind of confide to me
that they've had bad experiences and those those things kind of affect how
they book moving forward and so it's our job as hosts to give guests a consistent
and high-quality stay because Airbnb is still generally in the first two phases
of adoption it's not reached its critical mass and I think that the the
home sharing economy has a lot of growth you have to do and so adoption and Trust
is really built on us hosts right that's that first line of defense if we do a
good job then the guests don't need a call
you know Airbnb customer service but that leads us to the second problem here
so those six statistics of what normally goes wrong that's hosts and people use
their B&B platform as you know service providers but the other one is customer
service Brian Chesky an his team talked about this as well on this host QA I'll
put the link to that video in the description they said that they really
double down on their on their help workflow or the help flow which they
claimed that last year eighty percent of phone calls got answered in under a
minute they're going to be adding chat as a feature as a way to communicate
with Airbnb for help things like that it's because 82% of guests who called
customer service claimed that it was a problem right so 82% of guests who had a
problem and called customer service said that they had an issue with customer
service themselves like the customer service wasn't helpful now Brian Chesky
and his team did say that it's because Airbnb grew so quickly that they had a
hard time keeping up with the new amount of bookings right because customer
service is something you staff for and then in staff to plan to be where they
were they kind of grew faster than projected and that's kind of what their
explanation was but 53% of all of these guests that had a
problem with customer service you know during their negative stay or during
their stay they said that that was a primary concern so even the little
problem like the host check-in instructions aren't accurate I'm having
a hard time checking in right there just trying to get in to go to sleep
Airbnb customer service became the real problem if Airbnb customer service was
better maybe it could have been handled better and so with that said we as hosts
are the first and main line of defense and Airbnb is trying their best to keep
up but if we do a better job than air beam B's staff has less work to do and
it kind of makes it easier for everybody because then there's less work flow or
workload and maybe Airbnb steam can do a better job the better we do so I think
what we can take away from from this and Brian Chesky is talk as I don't think he
wants a you know scold hosts for being bad hosts it's not something he will
ever want to do on his own video but I think if he could say that without PR
jumping down his neck I think he would had this public call out to us hosts and
and asked us to do a better job and think a little bit more in depth about
her business so with that said though I'm gonna post the the actual breakdown
of Brian Chesky skew a except what I did is I did a video in seven minutes of
this 45 minute long video reel I did a seven-minute breakdown of everything
that they talked about just to save us some time so I'm gonna link the blog for
these the market research that was done with guest experiences and a lengthy
ink.com article - they're both of course negative in flavor but that's not the
point I'm not trying to dog Airbnb your dog other hosts but as hosts we need to
know when guests have negative experiences what those typically tend to
be and what kind of negative branding we are working through because even though
we don't agree with it perhaps right it's still something that other people
might think and if it's real to somebody else
we as hosts need to be empathetic to that and respond to them kind of on
their terms if you want to win your customer over you've got to kind of meet
them 99.9% of the way and then walk them back so I hope this was helpful and if
you have any other questions you want me to clarify something because
I know that was kind of a scramble totally asked for it in the comments
I'll be here for you so thank you for watching Aaron beam be automated and
I'll see you on the other side