unfair cancellation by airbnb

[Wesley10]

I was contact by a support member today wanting to ask me a few questions regarding a covid incident we had here this week. 

to spite all efforts to make sure that we comply with all the rules Airbnb had a support staff member contact me and with all facts in place just decided to cancel all my bookings. 

I found this completely unfair as we since heard the the clients had not contracted it with us at the great house but at a festival they attended that afternoon after leaving us. 

I request direct contact with the agent I spoke to to resolve this. 

Regards 

Wesley 

[Anonymous]

@Wesley10 this is a discussion forum of peers, not Airbnb customer service. Anyway, the service operation is outsourced to other companies, and customers don't get to decide which agent handles their support ticket.

I can't tell from your post exactly what happened, but if Airbnb gets a report that a guest tested positive for Covid during (or perhaps shortly after) their stay, they consider the home to be potentially contaminated, so it's standard procedure to temporarily suspend the listing and cancel the upcomong bookings.

This policy seems to be based on outdated notions of how the virus is spread (hence the overemphasis on surface cleaning) , so in that sense it may be unfair to hosts. But as a listing service, Airbnb always has a right to terminate bookings that it deems unacceptably risky. 

[Branka-and-Silvia0]

@Wesley10  are you on-site of off-site host? Because if you host at your home and share it with your guests than it might have sense, but if you don't live on the property you rent on Airbnb then there is no sense to be suspended.

Maybe it would help if you would make a test and send a negative test result to Airbnb CS. you wouldn't get your canceled bookings back but at least you would get a chance to rebook some dates

[Sarah977]

@Branka-and-Silvia0  I don't think Airbnb makes a distinction between shared or entire space on this. I think they're just taking the attitude that the home is unsafe if someone who tested positive was staying there.

[Lisa723]

@Wesley10 there is obviously no way to know exactly where and when the guests contracted the virus (unless some kind of genetic tracing has been done to pinpoint the source of transmission, which seems unlikely even in South Africa).

[Huma0]

@Lisa723 

Unless they have some kind of advance track and trace system. It's an unlikely scenario, but say the guests are staying in a self contained unit and had no contact with anyone that day until after they left the Airbnb and went to the festival and then get pinged by a track and trace App telling them they came into contact with someone with COVID that day...

[Huma0]

Out of interest, does anyone know what one should do if informed by a guest after they have checked out that they tested positive for COVID?

E.g. how long should one wait before entering the unit to clean?

How long should the unit be empty before another guest is able to check in?

What if it's a shared listing and there are other guests still there? Do you ask the guests to all take tests and then it's fine for them to continue their stay if they test negative, or should you cancel and refund and chuck the poor souls out because it's no longer to stay there even though the guest with COVID is gone? What if the guests simply don't take the tests? It's not like you can force them...