Airbnb has been holding a payment of 500+ euro for almost 2 months and refuses to release it, even after admitting the error is in their system, thus essentially stealing money. Support is now ghosting my messages. Conversation with support inside.
Conversation with support staff : https://imgur.com/a/zaA1ZA4
I rent out a full appartement on Airbnb since last year. Payouts all went smooth except for 1 at the beginning of January this year. The amount is 510 euro, which is not a lot for most hosts but it's quite a lot for me personally.
I sent a message to abnb support in January asking what the problem was, he said he was escalating it to IT because he couldn't help and that he was closing the ticket but somebody would be in contact.
Fast forward one month and nobody contacted me and I still haven't received a payout.
All payouts after this have gone through so it's clearly just something with this specific payout.
I make another ticket with support, the result of which you can see in the conversation in the link above.
The conversation in short: Airbnb admits it's an error on their side, specifically in their software. They say a lot of people are effected and that somebody is working on it.
They say that when the error is fixed, my payout will go through.
I say that the IT error isn't really my concern and that they should just manually approve the payment since there is no timeline on when this IT error will be fixed.
I basically get the same response, as in "you'll get your money when we fix our software".
After this, support is refusing to answer any more messages.
At this point, Abnb is essentially giving themselves a big ass unapproved 0% interest loan from a bunch of people that need that money. In my eyes, that's theft.
If I leave a restaurant and say that I'll pay for my food when I fix my phone, the restaurant owner, rightly, calls the police.
Also, I don't really understand what they mean with "when we fix the error".
Since all payouts before and after that one have gone smooth, there clearly is no error in their system anymore.
I like using Airbnb, both as a traveller and a host so I don't really want to escalate this too hard.
On the other hand, if Airbnb is randomly going to steal 500 euro's once in a while it's obviously not viable for me to use the platform.
Is there something, anything, I can do about this?
TLDR: Airbnb is holding money from a large amount of people for a long time because of an internal IT error and is refusing to pay until they fix that error. Essentially stealing money.
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