This forum is dedicated to connecting hosts with other hosts. Sign up to get the latest updates and news just for AirBnb hosts! Note that we are not affiliated with Airbnb - we are just passionate hosts!
If you were willing to shift the guests dates out further, you must have thought you could rebook the original dates. Otherwise you should have said,
“Since you are outside of our free cancel window, we can’t change your dates free of charge. We suggest you cancel your original booking and we will try to rebook it with someone else. If we ARE able to fill your cancelled dates at the same rate we will refund you XX amount minus XX cancel fee (whatever you want, maybe all)… In either case, you are welcome to make a new booking for future dates and we will be do our best to rebook and get you as much refund as possible if you cancel.”
No one is forcing you to use Airbnb, for many folks there are alternatives if you don’t like their policies.
The reality is that cases like this, given the number of daily stays in Airbnb listings, are actually rare.
We often only hear the bad shit on here, because let’s face it, who is going to go on a forum and rant about the past twelve (or twenty or one hundred) stays that went off without a hitch, the guests came and left without causing damage or issue and the host got paid.
Airbnb isn’t perfect, but for the vast majority of hosts it’s good enough.
Airbnb claims millions of bookings a year and yet people think it’s doomed and horrible and etc on the basis of a few hundred complaints they read on the internet. I don’t think folks understand numbers.
I’ve been hosting since 2016, and never heard about this scam. Never to late to learn something new. I’m glad to be forewarned.
Let me ask a question. It seems the only way a host can avoid such a scam is to simply not accept a reservation date change, particularly one made within a week of arrival. Presuming a host has future dates open, is the host obligated to accept the guest’s request to change dates?
It depends on the cancellation policy in force, but another method is simply to block off the freshly requested dates. The change then becomes “not possible”.
Funnily enough, I can only remember having to do one date change, and that was a genuine guest error, so we shifted the dates and the stay went ahead. This was on Vrbo, not Airbnb, never had to do one on there, yet!
Hotels routinely oversell by 5% or more. That if they have 100 room s, they happily take 105 reservations. On average, enough people cancel so that it works out fine. But, sometimes people show up to check in and have no room. Those guests are “walked” (industry term for sent to some other nearby hotel instead).
Regardless of the reason, if a host is in competition with hotels in their area they might not find a strict cancel policy to be in their favor. I understand they ways hotels are different and have a lot of leverage with policies that an individual host doesn’t have.
Hi there … yes I have a similar problem with Airbnb at the moment whereby a guest cancelled two days before arriving for a three month booking for the whole of our summer here in London. So the guest owed a cancellation fee. I don’t know what happened yet because, guess what, Airbnb won’t return my calls or messages. But I got an email on the day of ‘arrival’ saying “Problem collecting the payment resolved”. Hmmm, i didn’t know there was a problem! Then the next day got the dreaded “The attempt to charge your guest was unsuccessful” and then the killer blow “Airbnb is not liable”. I suspect the guest just changed their credit card details or cancelled the card. The one time I have managed to speak to an AB customer service - I said please please please tell me you take a payment up front for AB bookings? No they don’t. And so off he went to California to try and get someone who has just cancelled to pay a cancellation fee. Good luck with that! He ended (he was a junior and not in their payments team) by saying “I don’t know what to tell you, i’m sorry”. “Please read your Host Agreement, where you will understand we don’t have to pay you”. The promised payments specialist has never bothered to call me back …
One of the many reasons to never ever use Air for LTR. If you had taken it direct, this would not have happened, or you would have had at least 50% deposit and been able to rebook and avoid the loss.
Yep, we live and learn! I wish I didn’t rely on Airbnb for bookings (there only seem to be longer term bookings here in London at the moment), but at present I do. I don’t have any other method currently of getting direct bookings - but I will look into that as am feeling very disappointed by AB at the moment.
One of my all time favorite books but I love all of his works. He did a tour a few years back, had a stop in a nearby city and I looked into getting a ticket. They cheapest was over $400. I’ll stick with his books!
I got my 2 (then HS and college age) kids tickets to a Sedaris show back in 2012. He stayed for hours in a receiving line afterwards, signing books and drawing funny little pictures in them, and handing out hotel toiletries to “the teenagers.” Kids came out with a signed book and tiny soaps!
As someone new to the forum, you’ve just given yourself the perfect reason to do some homework! Go back and read past threads which might prevent you making the same mistakes that many of us did when we started out.
This forum is not called The University of Hosting for nothing!
Thanks Jefferson, yes I will give that a go - do you have a link to your page that I can take a look at to get an idea of it? (never used Facebook, though I do use Instagram)
I saw him here in El Paso in 2014. I didn’t take a book to be signed but he did similar here. A good bit of it was quite poignant because his sister had taken her life the prior year.
My ticket was only $50. I wonder if it was a matter of year or of venue or of timing. I got my tickets the day they went on sale. Surely this must have been re-sale price (aka scalping) or VIP.
