Cancellation fee charged by AirBNB

[Kevin948]

I have been charged a cancellation fee for a booking I cancelled.

The booking came through to me as single occupancy and I accepted the booking.

In an exchange of emails with the sole guest it transpired that there would be 5 working males in the apartment.

I explained that this was not welcome and that his booking request had been misleading.

I don't believe I am in the wrong to cancel a booking given the circumstances that I was mislead to the number of travellers in the group and feel aggrieved that I have been penalised.

(I would add that I have had a previous bad experience in accepting groups of males "working" in the area.)

[Emiel1]

@Kevin948 

Your listing mentions the accommodation is suitable for 5 guests, you charge an additional  fee for the 3rd,4th and 5th  guest.

So you could have asked the guest to update the reservation to the real amount of guests

You also could have asked he guest to cancel the booking, as the guest is initially at fault.

if you cancel yourself, you will be penalised. if you ask Airbnb to cancel penalty-free,then they will first give the guest the oppurtunity to update the reservation, because it could be a mistake.

But at the end you do not want 5 working men in your appartment, so i fear you must accept the penalties (Which also mean dates are blocked for a new reservation)

[Kevin948]

Hi Emiel1 many thanks for your email reply setting out some details of the T&Cs, hopefully its wont happen again. 

[William1636]

I have a cancellation fee issue also.

After several prompts/suggestions by AirBnB to enable automatic booking for my rental, I did do it.

(While this is besides the point here, I must mention that I do not recall seeing a policy text about cancellation fee when I enabled automatic booking for my AirBnB account)

On October 11, a non AirBnB guest who was staying at my rental place informed me that she would extend her stay for 2 more weeks. I tried immediately that same day to mark these dates as unavailable on my AirBnB calendar, but AirBnB would deny me access to ANY functionality on my account until I upload the scan of a government ID. This, I guess, must have been a very recent requirement as I never had such a request before.

Being out of town, in the countryside (in West Africa), with a terrible, quasi-inexistant  Internet connection, no proper scanner around, I had to wait until my return 2 days later to satisfy this request.

On the very morning of my arrival back home, 2 days later, on October 13, I received a notification that my place had been booked for 11 days, starting on October 18. My current guest's stay was extended until October 25th.

Less than 20 minutes after this booking I wrote to the guest, apologized, informed him that the place was not available and canceled his reservation. 20 minutes after the booking.

I still couldn't mark those days as unavailable and had to get the government-issued ID scanned and uploaded to my account before I could do anything again on my account.

Despite this effective account suspension from AirBnB stopping me from updating my calendar for several days, AirBnB is now charging me a $100 fee for having canceled this booking.

It is strange to me that AirBnB penalizes me for having to cancel a booking made ONLY because it would not let me update my calendar, for its own internal administrative reasons. It's not a big deal cause it's only $100 but it seems very unfair to me.

(Of course, I have instantly disabled automatic booking).

I am not sure what can I do...?

Any advice will be much appreciated.

Many thanks. 

[William1636]

One precision : when I say "automatic booking", I of course refer to what AirBnB calls "Instant book"

[Toetsie0]

did they not resolve this problem yet?