I was charged host cancellation penalty because airbnb messed up

[Jinhui0]

I made a new listing 2 days ago, and in the workflow to set up the listing, there was no step that lets me choose Instant Book or book only after I approve. No alert or any email notifying me of this after the listing was made and published. However, the Instant Book feature was automatically / by default selected as ON when I made the listing, and yesterday an instant booking came through that was for the same-day check-in. I was unable to host and had to cancel, but unable to cancel on my own and had to get airbnb customer service involved. In the end, they charged me a host cancellation penalty equal to the first night's rate. This is all within 18hours of when I made the listing, before I started to make even $1 off the listing. If I didn't already had another reservation from another listing, from which the penalty would be deducted from the payout, I would already have ditched airbnb for good.

I have been in contact with customer service for the past 2 days, yesterday and today, and all the customer service agents keep saying this is a standard policy for host penalty,  and they tried to close out my case without ever actually responding to my request to remove the penalty, or considering the special situation I had explained to them. 

The most ridiculous thing is, I caused the guest no trouble by canceling the booking, since I literally notified him within 5min of the booking that I couldn't host him. Yet, I was being charged a penalty as if I had last-minute cancelled a guest booking that came through a long time ago. 

Essentially, Airbnb **up their listing workflow design, and caused the problem, and refuse to correct the problem. All they keep saying is there is a policy, and they cannot do anything about it.

**[Title updated]

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Jinhui0 You made the listing live so you are responsible for honouring any bookings. If you can't even take responsibility for this then you may not be cut out for hosting.

[Jinhui0]

The whole situation, as I have explained, is that there was no step in the workflow that took me through making the listing that prompted me to choose the booking method. If you don’t understand the whole picture even after reading (or maybe you didn’t read) my post, and you can’t sympathize, you don’t need to comment.

[Helen3]

Unfortunately it sounds like you didn't familiarise yourself with how Airbnb works before letting your listing goes live. @Jinhui0 

you could have both blocked off dates in your calendar so you didn't receive bookings on dates you can't accommodate guests and you a absolutely can go into your listing and turn off IB/require one /two days notice for IB

do look at the Airbnb Help Website it has FAQs about most aspects of running your STR business on Airbnb.

Unfortunately for you it wasn't Airbnb that messed up here 

[Jinhui0]

How do they expect new hosts to know about this, when the booking method wasn’t prominently displayed and very easily missed? And they never prompted me to choose the booking method when I made the listing, so how am I supposed to know?

[Mary5794]

It is difficult to read up on all the nuances of the platform and I can understand your frustration.   That happened to me when we had a seasoned manager set up our account.....we ended up running and cleaning the place ourselves while the guests were in the house.  

Make sure if you block dates, that they are not randomly opened by a glitch in the Airbnb platform.  We had a year blocked off and suddenly Christmas, New Years and another 4 day holiday was unblocked and a guest booked it.  This just happened to us yesterday and we immediately messaged the guest and cancelled within a few hours and Airbnb is charging over $200 as a penalty to us.  We are trying to get a resolve from Airbnb as I type this reply to you.  There are several threads on this community that this is an ongoing problem.  Please be aware.

Good luck and I would recommend reaching out to an Superhost Ambassador that should have been assigned to you when you first signed up.