@Robbie54 I don't know if you saw the update in the other thread, but it turns out the South African host was a lot more diligent in her efforts to help the guest than it might have appeared from the original post.
I'd like to take this OP's story at face value, but I have no way to know what the other side of the story is. Fortunately this is a forum and not a jury. What I can say from staying at a lot of Airbnbs as a guest is that the majority of hosts I've booked with have offered nice homes, but they haven't been very well-versed in the particulars of the platform and they haven't had a well-trained skill in hospitality. When doing peer-to-peer commerce, you might hope for "professionalism" but most of the time you're dealing with an amateur who is not committed to knowing the nitty gritty of how this platform works. That's a fundamental difference between renting from an establishment like a hotel and renting from a random stranger from the internet. Whenever there's a problem in a peer-to-peer transaction, the person on whose side that problem lies carries most of the burden of responsibility for using the very easily available information to resolve it.
Had the host in this topic's booking been the one who initiated the thread, I would have been very critical of ghosting the guest's messages. But the guest was the one who posted, so that criticism would have been totally useless. If you really want to know where I'm coming from (and honestly I'm sure you don't), I think we're all individually responsible for making the decisions that best serve the outcomes we're trying to achieve. So I find it hard to sympathize with people who expect everything to work in their favor but don't use the tools right at their fingertips because they expect someone else to do the work for them.