I'm going to focus on facts in this post so please try to focus on those in responses as well. I have many opinions about the process, drivers of policies, but I'd like to hear facts and non emotional opinions from others. If some of the responses aren't civil I'll probably reach out to the community support to get those type of responses removed.
Guest gets sick on carpet. (It happens...it's vacation home after all.) Guest tries to clean it up with bleach (Noooooooo.) Ruins carpet, ruins towels, covers up the mess with a hassock before checking out AND doesn't tell the guest who booked the reservation.
I as host arrive after guests leave very late at night (after 14 hour drive due to roads closed due to winter storms, ugh), do my walk-around, notice the hassock has moved and the carpet is a bit stained, but don't realize the severity. I figure I'll take care of it in the morning with a wet vac and push the hassock back into the right spot. Wife checks more thoroughly and notices the severity of the problem and the bleach smell. I do a bit of searching online that night on how to estimate costs of replacing carpet, take a photo and head to sleep and decide to take care of it in the morning as I don't want to send the guest a nasty note in my state of sleep deprivation. Of note this is 2 days after Christmas at the height of the US Covid spike.
Another complicating factor in this whole saga may be that on the day of scheduled check-out the guest couldn't leave but we didn't extend the reservation until AirBNB had already automatically checked him out so I have to send a supplemental payment request for the extra night. He eventually pays this extra amount right at the 72 hour deadline before AirBNB has to get involved.
We call in our house cleaner the next day to help out. The next morning when more calm I submit the estimate I came up with the previous night $2.5k as a request directly to the guest. The original reservation was a Christmas reservation so this is still less then their full reservation cost. The renter replies rather quickly. I can tell he is upset, but...because he didn't know anything about it. I call him and talk to him. I believe him so I give him a bit of an overview of the damage reimbursement policies and tell him he'll probably only be out his security deposit and not the full $2.5k I put in the original request. He says he's going to call his friend.
I spend a lot of time over 3 days using the rug cleaner to get the carpet as good as it can be. We take the after photo showing the remaining bleach damage. The room airs out of the smell after a few days of having the windows open. We then go and buy a $200 area rug to cover it as we have guests booked pretty solid for the next month and don't want our guests to have to deal with the carpet looking like it does. I feel bad for the guest so later when we find the ruined towels hidden in a cabinet in the bathroom and realize the bed skirt is ruined too, I decide not to document or add anything else to the reimbursement request because $2.5k is going to be painful enough.
Because of Covid getting a contractor in to give me a real quote is a real pain. I get one guy in about 7 days later, but can never get an actual quote out of him. I end up PAYING Home Depot $50 just to give me a real quote about a week later that I can use as documentation. The quote itself doesn't come until after the 14 day post checkout date and it comes out to a bit over $1k.
Due to the age of the carpet 10 years, I am only reimbursed 20% or a bit over $200. My security deposit if $625. No matter how much I protest about the incongruity of my "security deposit" amount and the amount I'm being reimbursed. I try to add the other items back in but don't have great documentation and receipts so of course it's all rejected. Eventually I get into a back-and-forth with support about why I can't get my security deposit. They keep saying how the area rug I bought isn't damaged so they can't reimburse for the area rug completely misses the point that I'm trying to recover the full security deposit for the original ~$1k in damages that they have acknowledged. For the first time in my life I almost yell at a support person on the phone when calling AirBNB support to try and get access to the full security deposit despite the resolution request run-around.
Without trying to get into recriminations and opinions about the policy and the meaning of "security deposit." I'm curious of other's opinions of what happened. I think my initial estimate being rather high is a factor here especially when the actual quote came back in much lower. I chalk up the bad initial estimate up to sleep depravation. Some potential explanation options for how the rest of the process unfolded I have outlined below:
1) Guest didn't admit that he caused the damage. (I believe he didn't know about it due to the hiding of it with the hassock and the hidden ruined towels we eventually found stashed in a cabinet.) Therefore AirBNB didn't give me access to the security deposit and only reimbursed me through AirCover policy which has the 10-year deprecation built-in and leads to the 20% reimbursement.
2) Because I didn't get the final actual quote in past the magic 14 days I wasn't able to access the full security deposit.
3) The guest admits the damage was caused by his group, but since he personally didn't cause the damages, AirCover policy is invoked and only results in 20% recovery of the quoted damage.
I've gone through the "Host Damage Protection" terms and "AirCover" terms/documents and they are confusing at best. I've tried to answer the question of what happened with the process myself with the documents, but I'm giving up at this point and turning to all your collective knowledge and experience.
Please try to limit your responses to your guess based on your experiences to 1-3 above or propose #4-X of what I didn't consider...and keep it civil.
Thanks all!
Mike