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I have a current guest who booked our place for 6 weeks. Everything was going great, until all of a sudden this morning they want to cancel after 2 weeks in!
Since it was a longer term, AirBnB paid out the month… how does this work?
Am I supposed to refund them for the time unused? or are they just stuck with the charge? I’m open to being fair, but feel like I’m getting to be a bit screwed on this one… This was our first booking, so I need the review.
Just follow your cancellation policy. And if you decide to refund rebooked time (the only way I’d refund anything) then don’t do it until the money is in your account.
If this is your first Airbnb booking you made a mistake using your new host boost on a 6 week booking. You should have set a max of a few days so you could get several bookings and hopefully several reviews before the busy travel season. I assume you are in the N. Hemisphere but your profile says Charleston SC and your weblink says Slovenia, so who knows where the listing is.
The booking came in while we were getting our act together. Their leaving early is probably a blessing in disguise, as we were playing with rates to try to capture the first couple of bookings, and my wife and I were setting up different things trying to get the first booking.
Live and learn… Thanks for the feedback.
we had a “strict” cancellation policy setup for long stays, so we’re at least covered for a little bit. Here’s hoping the market picks up a little and we get some legit requests…
All long term stays, i.e. anything over 28 days, fall under the Long Term cancellation policy, regardless of the cancellation policy the host has chosen.
You should familiarize yourself with it.
Are you aware that any bookings over a month can put your guests into the category of tenants, depending on your local laws, subject to landlord/tenant laws and that you could have a situation where you would have to go through an eviction process if the guests refused to leave?
Also, it is a known scam that some guests book long term in order to get a discount, then cancel after a short time, trying to be refunded. In the meantime, their booking has blocked weeks of potential bookings from other guests.
I would strongly advise you to set a 2 week maximum, at least until you gain some experience in vetting guests, and get a bunch of good reviews under your belt.
@Schick You said they “want” to cancel. Have they? If you are amenable to offering them any refund (and there is no reason to feel you should- they blocked your calendar to other bookings for the next 4 weeks), make sure they understand that they need to cancel in order for your calendar to open to new bookings, so that if any of their cancelled dates get rebooked, you would be in a postion to give them some refund.
Also, never refund if you get a replacement booking until after you get paid for the new booking, because you never know if a new booker is going to end up cancelling before arrival and you end up not getting paid, or only getting partial payment.
Thanks Muddy.
So it was kind of a corporate client type scenario and the facility their people were working at were told this morning that the facility is closing.
Worked it all out. Cancellation happens tomorrow when they check out. They’re paid through the end of the month and now we have the place back to open for bookings.
A bit of panic on our part being new at this. Appreciate all the support from you and everyone else in this.
It’s not as easy as it looks to navigate this industry for certain…
I was thinking about this the other day, but didn’t realize that it was a known scam. We offer length-of-say discounts and I wondered what would happen if someone books a longer stay and then leaves early.
In this example, assuming the guest got a discount for booking a 28+ day stay and then cancels after 2 weeks, they should pay what they would have paid had they booked originally for 2 weeks.
In any case, I wouldn’t give a refund on any empty nights they tied up that aren’t rebooked.
For sure. But the nature of scammers is that they have no moral compass and will lie to get what they want. So what sometimes happens is that they make up some “issue”, either with the place itself, or with the host, and give that bogus story to some clueless Airbnb rep who refunds them. (It seems that some hosts are successful in getting poor CS decisions reversed, but not without persistence)
Of course scammer guests can do that on a short booking, too, it’s just a harder pill to swallow if they’ve blocked a month or more of your calendar to other bookings.
