@Lizzie - The biggest issue for me is that the entire policy protects Airbnb from abuse by limiting their exposure and protecting its ability to keep their fees, but it does absolutely nothing to protect hosts. As several other hosts have already pointed out, we have seen absolutely no data showing concretely a trend that a policy such as this will help secure more reservations. In the retail world, it is true if you get the person to register and get them rung up, they are less likely to return an item than to pass up buying it all together. If there is data that shows a guest is less likely to cancel once they have made a reservation vs. not making the reservation at all, this should be very easy to report. Surely Airbnb wants us to be comfortable and supportive of a data-driven decision such as this.
When Airbnb rolls programs out in a professional way (don’t get me STARTED on their lack of transparency and communication), they would provide us with all the benefits, supported by real data, that a change in policy like this will do for us, not just their “gut feeling”. Also, they would lay out a goal number of increased reservations they intend to achieve and show us measurements on a quarterly basis of how this policy is stacking up against the goal to determine if it was really a good change at all. I’m sure they are doing this in the corporate office, but they are not sharing this with us down here in the trenches taking the hits. It’s really difficult to support any policy change they provide because it is immediately met with distrust and lack of agreement.
That being said, I do want to thank you for trying to provide some clarity around this option. As a details person, this doesn't really go far enough for me. You “know” I have a whole lot of questions (and opinions to go with them):
1. Three refunds per year per guest - To prevent abuse, guests are limited to three fully refunded cancellations a year.
This assumes that it only goes against “free refunds” which, in essence, means they get back their Airbnb fees AND accommodation fees. So what happens to the reservation on cancel #4? Airbnb gets to keep their transaction fee and the host still gets bupkiss or do they get 50%? So the host is always hostage for 48 hours with a strict cancellation, right?
And what about in this scenario …. Guest books 3 Flexible reservations and cancels them all, outside the 3-free window (because it’s a 48 hour window for those policies too). This guest has paid Airbnb 3 times and hosts have received nothing (they have received a full 100% refund of accommodation fees). Now the guest books a Strict property, and cancels within 48 hours, even makes 3 such reservations, so they NOW get 3 free. So 6 reservations later, 6 hosts have been jerked around and received nothing and Airbnb has recouped service fees on 3 Flexible reservations. Am I interpreting this refund system correctly? If the guest never takes the “freebie”, they can book and cancel and book and cancel and book and cancel and never have to pay a host a thing? This seems ripe for abuse.
What I can tell you, as a Moderate property, we’ve seen a dramatic uptick in cancellations since the change in policy and most definitely not an uptick in reservations.
2. No full refunds for overlapping bookings - To make sure guests are not making multiple bookings and then cancelling, any booking made by a guest when they already have an active booking for those dates will not be covered under our grace period policy.
Wait, WHAT?! Airbnb is going to keep all the service fees from, let's just say 3 or 4 reservations, that a booking guest makes but all 3 or 4 hosts are getting nothing? And how are you combating when 4 different people make bookings for the same time period who are traveling together? What situation will this be that Airbnb keeps fees or can even TRACK that this behavior is going on? If the guests are added to the reservation, does Airbnb retroactively go back and get their fees back?
3. Three refunds per year per guest
Do these “free/grace period cancellations” count as cancellations we see in guest statistics? Will I get to see exactly how many times a guest has booked a space for a few days while they sleep on it separately or will it only show us traditional cancellations lumped together with these? Will cancellations of this kind be seen as reasons for a legit host cancellation because we are uncomfortable with this guest’s behavior ("sorry ABNB, I don't want this reservation because they cancel 50% of the time").
Thanks in advance for the additional clarification @Lizzie