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Yesterday (01Jan21) my guest message me on AIRBNB chat that she cannot stay at my place (booked for 13Jan check in for 1.5 month) due to her illness. I understand the current situation and I am willing to waive the penalty fee. I message AIRBNB for advice.
Few hours later I got message from AIRBNB app to ask me if I will accept my guest’s request to cancel her upcoming booking and I had positive response ( accept by choosing its ACCEPT button, not by typing).
What I found was that my calendar for the whole 1.5 month was blocked and still block now. I cannot edit it to available. Moreover, it put the label this booking is cancelled BY ME. I don’t understand why AIRBNB treat their superhost like this. I have never and will never cancel the booking from my end. It cause bad impact to me.
When you get a message asking if you will accept a cancellation, you always need to decline it, because that is registered as a host cancellation.
This has got to be the sneakiest, most unethical thing Airbnb does to hosts.
Call them and plead your case. Tell them that nowhere are hosts informed that trying to be generous to a guest by accepting a cancellation will be registered as a host cancellation. It’s outrageous.
I just got a call from AirBNB Help Center and I check that my calendar is unblocked for those 47 nights. I ask them to be sure I won’t be deducted USD 50 from my next booking for penalty.
I’m not sure I’m getting this. Guests cancel all the time and all you get from Airbnb is a message that the guest has canceled, and how it affects your payout. I suppose being asked if you’ll cancel the guest was mistaken for being asked for permission for the guests to cancel, but it still seems convoluted to me. And I never heard of any special procedure called declining a cancellation. Can OP explain this to me?
I don’t know exactly how this message looks, because I’ve never gotten one. But yes, if the guest just cancels on their own, all you see is that it’s been cancelled. And the guest is refunded or not according to your policy.
But there’s also some option for the guest to ask the host to approve a cancellation. Then the host gets this message, with an accept/decline option, which gets registered as a host cancellation, refunding the guest in full.
As far as I understand, there are 3 ways to cancel (in terms of system). Anyone can rectify if I am wrong.
By guest.
It occurred to me before but no problem as it is in 48-hour window after booking done. So it was no cancellation penalty to guest.
By host.
Hosts push the cancellation from their end, due to any reason such as they no longer want to accept guest. I have never do this.
By AirBNB assistance
In the situation that either guest or host want to cancel but want to waive the penalty.
It occurred to me 2 times by guest inquiry because of the pandemic situation. Their governments suggested thier citizen to avoid going to my country.
The latest incident on New Year’s Day occurred after I got inquiry from guest via BNB message box and I asked Resolution Center by message box for advice. Few hours later I got the message asking if I would accept or decline the cancellation inquiry from guest with condition waive and I responded to them by pushing “accept” button. That’s why I saw this incident occurred by AirBNB assistance but later found that it was seen “by host” action.
Thank you Muddy. From this incident, I will never select “accept” again, should I have this kind of request in the future. What I will do is to ask guest to send message to AirBNB for assistance.
Thank you Christine. I am happy that my post can help our host community to avoid the situation I met. Maybe not every host will be lucky to have positive response from the Help Center.
