I tried going through the app. The message thread disappeared completely from the Inbox, though I can still see the messages when I go into his Reservation, then click “Message”. Wasn’t sure if he would be able to see any of the messages through the site.
In all my bookings, if a reservation is made to start on a particular date, for instance April 15, the guest’s credit card is billed on the next day and deposited into my account.
Since this guest supposedly paid for the reservation, if that payment is not deposited in your account the following day, for the entire booking, the guest does not have a reservation.
Even with as busy and non-responsive as AirBnB seems to be, if you did not receive payment on day 2, then you have no obligation to keep the space available for the guest.
1 Like
That isn’t true. While you may have had all your payouts appear in your account the day after the guest arrived without a hitch, that isn’t true for everyone. I’ve had payments delayed for up to a week. But the guest had paid and certainly had a legitimate reservation, Airbnb just didn’t release te payment when they are supposed to.
Thank you all for your suggestions and advice!
By way of update, the payment is now shown on the transaction page as “Processing”, meaning it is coming through. I contacted support through Twitter, FB, and the Airbnb support chat, with some strongly worded messages and eventually got an e-mail from the Trust team, with this:
“Thanks for your inquiry—we apologize for the delay in the receipt of your payout(s). We’ve reviewed your account information and have been able to release any payouts you were still waiting to receive. On occasion, payouts may be temporarily paused and subject to a routine security check to preserve the integrity of your account and your funds. This pause has now been lifted and any due payouts released.”
So it does seem that the guest did in fact pay and does still have an active reservation. I still don’t understand why his account was supposedly “frozen” and his behaviour remains odd and suspicious, but at least the payment came through.
All in all, a weird and stressful situation, but seems to be coming to a positive resolution.
1 Like
Your optimism and trust might be misplaced. In this environment, the last thing I would trust is what amounts to an automated email.
I would call and have a human being confirm that Air actually received payment from the Guest - that actually be processed to you. Otherwise, they must immediately release your calendar.
Under these circumstances, “Processing could mean nothing at all”. It might even mean “the Guest never actually paid us but we’ll happily forward $0 to you”.
Bear in mind that Air would not communicate with you until after you hit them on social media - for a Core Function of their platform. Yeah, I could be wrong but better safe than sorry.
We are very glad and fortunate that we took a tenant on March 1st for our stay.
I hope this does work out for you. If it does and the Guest wishes to continue - take him direct and have him pay up front! No more Air bs …
1 Like
We did get confirmation. We received the notification that the full payment amount was released to us.
This whole process has revealed to me how unhelpful support is, how there is a total lack of transparency, and how little faith other hosts have in the platform (understandably)! If it weren’t for the fact that Airbnb takes up the lion’s share of the market, I suspect we (and many others) would look elsewhere for STR!