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I am part of a group of hosts that have raised concerns regarding Airbnb’s introduction of the free 48 hour cancellation, both because no meaning analysis has been carried out on the impact for hosts and because of safety concerns.
Today Airbnb have announced…
"Before the change goes into effect, we’ll share more about what we’re doing to address your concerns, particularly around protecting your listing details from being shared with guests who cancel. But for now, we’d like to clear up some confusion and help you better understand the new policy and how it will benefit the whole community:
Here’s how the new grace period policy will work
Guests must cancel within 48 hours after booking and can only cancel if their check-in date is 14+ days away.
To prevent abuse, guests are limited to three fully refunded cancellations a year.
To make sure guests are not making multiple bookings and then cancelling, any booking made by a guest when they already have an active booking for those dates will not be covered under our grace period policy.
It is good to see they have recognised some concerns and responded promptly. I can only think this is because there has been a massive backlash.
My pleasure What’s interesting is that they are now including; guests can’t cancel more than three times under this policy and can’t hold multiple reservations for the same date (not in their original policy).
Sadly I think this is giving them too much credit. They somehow realized that we could exchange info during this time!!! And oh noooooo, that can not be allowed. They really didn’t fix anything for our benefit. you know??
Mostly it would be a waste of time but I could see someone doing it now when they are rolling out major changes. The Airbnb community forums are moderated by Airbnb so they’re certainly reading those. I didn’t look to see what people were saying there about the 48 hour cancellation policy. The Reddit thread I saw seemed favorable towards it.
That makes it sound like nothing changed they just pushed back implementation because they realized they did a terrible job of informing hosts. And the idea that no one knows what the policy is or when it goes into effect unless they are on the Airbnb Community forums is great too.
And if they realized they don’t want people to be able to use the cancellation policy to get contact information then they need another month to re-do the software changes.
What’s interesting is that they are now including; guests can’t cancel more than three times under this policy and can’t hold multiple reservations for the same date (not in their original policy).