Merging accounts - recycling email addresses

[Joanne703]

For reasons that escape me, I ended up with 2 accounts - the one I signed up with many many years ago, and the one that I've actually been using for many years, and that has all of my trip history and reviews associated with it.

I wanted to merge them - but that feature doesn't exist  (and, as a coder myself, I know how much of a nightmare it would be to implement). 

So I deactivated the old one, and then tried to switch the email of my existing one to be the address associated with the old one.

Sadly, I was prevented :- "Email was recently in use by another user" said the computer.

Anyone know how to get around this?

Will 'recently' eventually expire and allow me to reclaim my one true email adress?

[Sarah977 · Accepted solution]

@Joanne703  No, it won't expire. You'd have to get Airbnb customer service to help you with that. They can also delete the old account entirely, rather than it just being deactivated.

But their CS dept is so incompetent these days that you might risk them deleting the wrong account, losing you all your previous reviews.