Journal article: 'Can a Company’s Poor Customer Service Be a Security Risk? An Examination of Airbnb’s Twitter Data Using Artificial Intelligence Supervised Machine Learning'

From the Journal of Applied Security Research (2025)

This research explores whether poor customer service can lead to security risks for customers. Airbnb was used as the case study subject for this research as its customer service is largely transparent to the public due to Airbnb’s reliance on Twitter.

While existing literature has documented both Airbnb’s poor customer service and safety and security risks at Airbnb sites, no research has explored the relationship between these two phenomena. Using Artificial Intelligence Supervised Machine Learning, this study examined over 300,000 tweets to u/Airbnbhelp over a period of seven years, from January 1, 2013, to September 2, 2020.

This review showed that the public primarily contacts u/Airbnbhelp to complain about Airbnb’s customer service; however, these complainants frequently cited Airbnb’s lack of customer service in situations reflecting serious security issues, including unsafe conditions and account hacking.

This review shows that Airbnb not only has poor customer service, but this lack of attention to customer service puts its customers at personal and financial risk. It is possible that dysfunctional organizational bureaucracy, illustrated by the reliance on bots, could be a contributing factor.

Stumbled across this while this sub entered into deeper discussion of this post yesterday:
https://www.reddit.com/r/airbnb_hosts/comments/1t9jr2u/random_family_shows_up_at_home_after_scammer/
... as it is on point with the genuine risk to hosts of harm from scammers given the downsides of Airbnb support.

To me, a takeaway is that Airbnb customer support is viewed by industry observers as atrocious, and that is a bigger problem than framing it as for example "only the bad stuff gets reported on this sub."

Of note, the study focuses on DMs to Airbnb Twitter, which I and others here can confirm are useless for retaliatory reviews particularly, vs. chat and phone calls to Support.