COVID-19 , Refunds and Airbnb service Fees

[Jennifer-And-Simon0]

Last week we had a guest cancel at one of our properties. She was coming for her daughters wedding in August, which had now been canceled due to COVID-19. We made a personal decision early on, when this situation started to unfold, that we would to refund all guests who needed to cancel due to the impacts of the pandemic. So we refunded this guest in full at the time she canceled.

Yesterday we received the following message from Airbnb (quoted verbatim):

"We have recently heard from your guest and sadly, they can no longer continue their trip due to the current ongoing global health issues. As such, they are looking to cancel this reservation and get a refund in full.

Your guest has canceled their reservation outside our Extenuating Circumstance policy as such, we are bound to uphold you host cancellation policy.

We understand that situations affecting your guest ability to continue your reservation sometimes occur. In line with this, in light of this ongoing situation we would like to know if you are amenable to provide a full refund to your guest in the spirit of Airbnb.

Kindly respond to this message, so we can further assist you in the process.

Thank you for taking hosting to another level. Your Super host status speaks volume not just for who you are but how you are as a host in our community.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon."

"In the spirit of Airbnb" we checked the booking and saw that we had already given a full refund so we called the guest to find out what was going on. It turned out that Airbnb had not refunded their service fee to the guest, which came to several hundred dollars! The guest had thought that we had pocketed the money and did not realise that it was Airbnb who had kept the money.

So I sent the following reply:

"can you please confirm if Airbnb will also refund their service fees to XXX?"

In response they sent the following and shut the ticket:

"As per the cancellaiton policy she agreed on when she booked the reservation, free cancellation for 48 hours, as long as the guest cancels at least 14 days before check-in. Also, guests can cancel up to 7 days before check-in and get a 50% refund of the nightly rate, and the cleaning fee, but not the service fee.

As such, we are unable to provide her a full refund of the Airbnb fees.

It has been 72 hours and we still have not heard from your guest xxx. As such, we encpurage her to contact us again once they're able to provide documentation. Hence, we are closing this ticket for the time being.

Should you decide to provide a refund please refer to our Resolution Center to issue the funds to your guest."

Am I then only one who is appalled at the hypocrisy of this response?

Airbnb requested that I override my cancellation policy and provide a full refund to my guest "in the spirit of Airbnb" (which I had already done anyway, in the spirit of humanity) and then turn around and refuse to refund the guest their service fees, citing the same cancellation policy!

Is the "spirit of Airbnb" only applicable to hosts and not to Airbnb themselves. I feel that this attitude towards guests and hosts is disgraceful at the best of times but, in the current situation, it is really deplorable. 

I have never posted anything on a forum before but this has upset me so much that I felt I had to voice it somewhere!

[Tish6]

The lack of transparency from Airbnb during this whole time is mind boggling and depressing when as hosts we are trying to do the right thing by our guests. Front up, Airbnb and tell the guests that it is you who are keeping the guest booking fees and NOT the hosts!

[Rodney11]

@Jennifer-And-Simon0 , good on you for taking the initiative to refund all your guests their cancelled trips due to COVID-19, I believe that is the most ethical decision a Host can take. 

However, I think you may have confounded a few things. A Host can cancel any guest reservation any time. There are penalties and consequences to this however. Generally, the host is charged $50 or $100, depending their Host status and cancellation policy, and after 3 cancellations in a 12 month period, the Host can be suspended from the platform. When a Host cancels the reservation, I believe the guest is refunded the full amount, except for AirBnB's fees.

On or around Mar 14. AirBnB rolled out a program that allowed guests to cancel their stays with a 100% refund (including AirBnB fees) and no penalty to either the Host or the guest, as long as the guest selected COVID-19 as the reason for cancelling. This was for stays booked before Mar 14 with a check in date of Mar 14 - Apr 14. This has since been extended to May 31. Hosts will be compensated 25% of the amount they would have received had the guest cancelled under the Host's current cancellation policy. This mostly benefits Hosts with Strict cancellation policies, who for the most part will be seeing 25% of the 50% (total 12.5%) they would have received for a cancellation under this policy. I believe this program has now been extended to check in dates up to Jun 30, but Hosts will not be compensated for any cancellations with a check ins beyond May 31.

Recently, AirBnB also rolled out a program that allows Hosts to cancel any bookings made before Mar 14, regardless of check in date, penalty free, and guests would get a 100% refund (including AirBnB fees). Hosts have until Apr 30 to take advantage of this program. Hosts will not receive any compensation for booking which they initiate the cancellations, though it does allow a Host to clear their calendar penalty free.

I am not privy to your account, but from your message I am guessing that you cancelled your guests bookings yourselves under your current cancellation policy. You should have reached out to your guests and request they cancel their bookings from their end using COVID-19 as the reason. This would have given the guests a 100% refund, including all fees, and protected you from any cancellation penalties.

Despite my feeling that AirBnB have completely bungled their handling of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on their Hosts, I have found their front line customer service agents to be very helpful in these situations. I suggest your contact AirBnB Help and open up a new ticket requesting all your cancellations be considered under the COVID-19 program so guests get their full refunds, including service fees, and you do not get dinged for any cancellation penalties.

I am only providing you with this advice based on my understanding of your situation from the info you posted. My apologies if I misread your situation. Also, some of my recommendations to you may be based on incomplete or out of date info; I trust other hosts will set me right on these matters.

Finally,  I highly recommend you read the posts from a Host named @Susan17 . She is a treasure trove of info on AirBnB/Host relations. 

Best of luck to you, and mostly I hope you are staying safe and healthy in these uncertain times.

[Jennifer-And-Simon0]

Hi Rodney,

thank you for your very thorough response. In this particular case the following happened

1. The guest canceled her own booking on April 13. Because her booking was in August she did not meet Airbnbs current COVID-19 Extenuating Circumstances policy so my normal Strict cancelation policy was applied.
2. She didn’t talk to us before canceling but even if she had the new policy allowing hosts to cancel bookings penalty-free was not in place on April 13 we could not have used that option.
3. When we saw the cancellation we contacted her and offered her a full refund, which she gratefully accepted.
4. We initiated a full refund from our end. As far as we knew this meant that she would get all her money back.
5. When the guest received her refund several hundred dollars had not been refunded (it was a large booking). She contacted Airbnb about this.
6. Airbnb then sent me the message above and asked me if I would consider refunding my guest “in the spirit of Airbnb”. I think they didn’t realise at this point that the missing money was their service fee and that I had already refunded my guest!
7. Once I worked out what was going on I wrote back to Airbnb and asked them if they would refund their fees.
8. They wrote back and said that they could not do that because of their cancellation policy.

I am not upset that Airbnb asked me the waive my cancellation policy “in the spirit of Airbnb” but I am really upset that they then refused to waive theirs. I just feel that this is so hypocritical.  I was also upset that they would treat their guest so poorly and take their money like that, especially given the circumstances. Though the guest falls outside the official COVID-19 Extenuating Circumstances she has clearly been impacted and a little compassion and understanding for her situation might have been nice.

I am not concerned about losing the money for this booking,  all I want is for my guest to get her money back from Airbnb. I am also not concerned about receiving any compensation from Airbnb, all I would really like from Airbnb is a little respect!

[Rodney11]

Thanks for the clarification @Jennifer-And-Simon0 , sounds like you've gone above and beyond for your guest. Seems like it's AirBnB who needs to act in the "spirit of AirBnB", innit? 

[Susan1169]

I totally agree that they should not get their service fee.

[Jonathan1257]

@Rodney11 I'm afraid it is all one way traffic. The ploy is to keep guests happy going forward. Airbnb doesn't want to lose a penny if they can get away with it. See rolling cancellation policy on a monthly basis. There's no strong management team at this unicorn x unicorn...hopefully they'll raise the standards going forward to quality housing. As for customer service it's a game of beat the customer. I'm comparing to great service like Stripe and Wix who seem to run an old school model where the customer is always right.

[Derek157]

A word to the wise.  Having been told to self isolate for 12 weeks, I contacted AirBnB Support to check whether there would be any penalties for cancellations.  I was told by a very nice young lady that no, no penalty on me and the guest would receive a full refund.  I sent the reservation numbers to Support and the bookings were accordingly cancelled - I had previously advised potential guests what was happening.  Then along came the so called "compensation scheme".  I received an email with details of THREE bookings for which I would receive compensation.  When I queried what had happened to the rest I was advised that because I had cancelled the bookings (in fact ti was Support at my request) and not the guest they fell outside of the scheme.  So I lost £800 worth of bookings and received compensation of £44!  Moral of the story - do not try to do the decent thing and look after the interests of your guests.  AirBnB will find some way to wriggle out of paying you a bean that they don't have to.

[Derek157]

Sorry - just read on and I note that others have had the same problem.  I also believe as do others that a cancellation is a cancellation, whoever makes it, and if it due to the covid-19 situation that we all find ourselves trying to cope with, then the compensation scheme should apply equally. 

[Ange2]

@Jennifer-And-Simon0  

I had a guest who wanted to cancel (this was months ago, pre-covid)  a day or two before arrival, they said they had double-booked (I thought that was not possible on Airbnb).   Airbnb contacted me and laid it on thick re: me giving a full refund but refused to refund its fee (btw: I had already agreed to refund in full despite my strict policy).  I even got a smack on the wrist - you have no right to offer the guest a return of the Airbnb fee, which I hadn't anyway, but the laser-like focus on Airbnb's fee made it clear what was of overriding importance to Airbnb - not the guest or the host.  So yes to hypocrisy,  deplorable and disgraceful, but no to it being a surprise. It's business as usual for Airbnb.  Add to that the problem when the  guest believes it is the host who is refusing  and Airbnb does nothing to enlighten them,  nor support the host in enlightening the guest.

[Jennifer-And-Simon0]

Thank you Ange, it is heartening to see that I am not alone in thinking this behaviour is so insincere. My guest was also most surprised to learn that it was Airbnb, not me, that had kept the money. She had also had to cancel a few other bookings with other hosts and only realised from the conversation with me that Airbnb had kept the fees for those booking as well. 

[Jonathan1257]

@Ange2 Nailed it..our guests never contact Airbnb,  we do all the legwork. The times when a guest complains about the price of a stay but doesn't seem to notice that the £300 charge for a 10 day stay is all for Airbnb.

[Jonathan1257]

@Jennifer-And-Simon0 It gets worse. We had the decency to cancel two reservations because they had seen the new Airbnb virus policy. Was then told by Airbnb that when I cancel it voids the 25% refund to hosts and incurs a cancellation charge. We followed all UK rules but by pressing the button on the keyboard we lose out. Airbnb seem to think that we are lying but they can see emails in their system showing that the guests contacted us. I'm afraid at present Airbnb are pretty greedy. 

[Rodney11]

@Jonathan1257  that is most unfortunate. I made sure to ask my guests for them to initiate the request to cancel so I would qualify for the 25%. But really, AirBnB could have saved us all the trouble by making the cancellation, and compensation, much easier and more transparent.

[Susan17]

"That is most unfortunate"

Not unfortunate at all, @Rodney11 - deliberately deceptive. I repeatedly requested clarification from Airbnb on this issue - including tagging Aisling Hassell, VP of Community Support, on a thread here in the CC - as I strongly suspected that this is exactly what would happen, and that any host who agreed to "Issue Full Refund" would find that cancellation excluded from the 12.5% payouts.

Airbnb was using every trick in the book to route COVID-19 cancellations back to hosts - even when they clearly qualified under the COVID/EC policy and there was absolutely no need for the host's involvement at all - because that allowed them to both disqualify that booking from a $250 million fund payout (by classifying it as a "mutual cancellation") and collect their own service charges. 

Needless to say, no responses were forthcoming from anyone at Airbnb to my many attempts to query this when I first noticed it happening.