Today I got an email from Airbnb saying that she is from the Airbnb Safety Team and that during one of my past reservations 'the Safety Section of their community guidelines may not have been followed' and 'they were going to limit my account access whist they look into this'. They also said they 'may' cancel future reservations but four hours after sending me the email they still haven't cancelled my future reservations.
I responded politely just saying something along the lines of …..thankyou for email, whether they were able to let me know which reservation it related to and what the exact issue was? I also said I was happy to work with them to resolve this positively for all.
All I can think of is that there was a lady guest about 3 weeks ago that had an issue with my place and that person did leave me a negative review. They also said they were going to take the issue up with Airbnb (1st negative review in the 110 reviews of my current place). I also left her a negative review as I wasn't happy about their behaviour and they did cause some minor damage (stains to carpets etc, didn't follow house rules). This guest kept pushing for a full refund on Airbnb which I declined. I eventually blocked her on Airbnb because she was bombarding me with messages. Airbnb contacted me to say she still wanted a full refund – I explained the situation and that as a goodwill gesture to put this to bed I would offer 40% back (about £20 / $30US) and the person from Airbnb just said ‘okay’. From my understanding that was the last of it and I haven’t heard anything more. That was about 10 days ago.
I have been suspended before (mid January 2020 before Covid was a thing) for 7 days - no reason given that time except that one day I couldn’t alter my listing calendar and when I rang Airbnb they said they were looking into it. I never got to the bottom of what ‘it’ was and on the 7th or 8th day or so they just rang me to say my account was no longer suspended and thanked me for being a loyal host etc. At that time I was in the same situation – they said that I was still responsible for future listings but couldn’t take any new bookings etc.
Has anyone else had experience with this or been in a situation like this before? Like I say I do suspect it was to do with the recent negative review I had.
I understand from reading other people’s experiences that sometimes they’ve got banned permanently without explanation, sometimes got a telling off from Airbnb and been allowed to continue to host and sometimes like what happened to me in January 2020 their account is suspended randomly and then reinstated randomly.