Air BnB Legal Question!

April 21, 2014 2:27 PM

I need to send some legal documents (a wage garnishment assignment from a spousal support court judgement) to the appropriate department at AirBnB. The garnishment is for one of their employees, my ex-husband. I am having trouble locating the appropriate contact at AirBnB. Does anyone have an email address or direct phone number for either the legal department or Accounts Payable?

I have tried calling the corporate phone number, it goes to a voicemail box that is always full. The help lines go to a third-party help desk with no access to corporate contacts. I tried mailing the documents to the corporate address and got no response, though it was signed for. Ex-husband is refusing to provide info, surprise surprise.

I do not have a lawyer, and I cannot afford one. I am also out of state for the moment, so hauling him back to court is not an option for the next several months. Please help! If I can find a contact at AirBnB I can get this process going. I've done this with his previous employer, so I know the drill. Thank you!

posted by ananci to Work & Money (10 answers total)

Best answer: You need to send to attention: Human Resources or attn: Payroll at their corporate address.

That is where those have always been sent at any company (large or small) I've ever worked for.
posted by magnetsphere at 2:34 PM on April 21, 2014

airbnb will have an agent for service of process in the state where it's incorporated.
posted by bruce at 2:36 PM on April 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

You can check with the California Secretary of State for addresses for service. So far I haven't found any phone numbers for them, though.
posted by asperity at 2:40 PM on April 21, 2014

I have no idea whether these numbers are valid, but here's a listing from the BBB.
posted by asperity at 2:42 PM on April 21, 2014

As near as I can tell the people who deal with their legal things can be emailed at [e-mail] I would not be surprised if you get the same runaround but I'd at least try it.
posted by jessamyn at 2:49 PM on April 21, 2014

Best answer: Their corporate headquarters are at: 888 Brannan St, San Francisco, CA 94103. Send a letter with signature required for delivery to the Human Resources Dept.
posted by quince at 3:15 PM on April 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Try tweeting to them (https://twitter.com/Airbnb) and add all of their founders (@nathanblec, @bchesky, @jgebbia) and their head of HR @Levymarkj
posted by the agents of KAOS at 3:18 PM on April 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Tweeting to them with a link to this question in the tweet as well as the various VC firms that have invested in them will get people's attention.
posted by dfriedman at 3:34 PM on April 21, 2014

AirBnB is a Y-Combinator alumni. I tried to search Hacker News for some kind of contact info but no luck. However, in order to apply to Y Combinator, you have to have a Hacker News handle (or did at one time -- certainly this would have applied to AirBnB founders even it is no longer true). So the founders of AirBnB have to have handles over there -- all of them. Every last one of them had to have a handle to apply for seed funding and all the support Y Combinator offers.

I don't know if it would be wise to post an Ask HN over there -- it is very different from Ask Metafilter and gets a lot fewer replies and this specific question might not go well. But if I were trying to get a contact inside AirBnB, I would spend a bit of time looking through discussions of AirBnB on Hacker News and see if I couldn't turn up some additional contact info on the founders.
posted by Michele in California at 4:04 PM on April 21, 2014

Response by poster: Guess what! Not TEN MINUTES after I posted this question, my mom called to let me know she received a check in the mail from them (I use her address because I move so much for work).

So I guess mailing it to the corporate headquarters worked! I marked it for accounts payable. I found out at the last company that HR doesn't handle this kind of stuff. It just took waaaay longer than I thought. It's been almost a month!

Thanks so much, you guys. Awesome responses. I would never have thought of half of this stuff. I am so relieved. This has been stressing me out for so long.
posted by ananci at 4:11 PM on April 21, 2014 [7 favorites]