Senior Safety Ambassador Issued Refunds Improperly, Inaccurately, and without Notification

[Mỹ-Ái0]

We are property managers on 18 listings, and we are listing owners on a specific property but not receiving any payout on this specific property. This property had a reservation that was cancelled by Airbnb due to the guests having an unauthorized party. It was a 2 day stay.

1. Airbnb without notification or authorization from us, issued a refund for the 2nd night as it was cancelled by Airbnb, even though this guest committed a clear violation of the terms of service and we also have a firm cancelation policy.

2. The way this support person issued the refund, is by taking the total (including the cleaning fee) and dividing it by 2 and refunding that amount. The base rate on the 2nd night was significantly lower as well, so this refund was not even properly calculated.

3. The biggest issue is they applied the refund deduction to the owner account that is receiving 0% of the payout and cleaning fee so this account is now on hold due to insufficient funds.

4. We talked to this individual Ambassador multiple times on phone and on chat and explained in detail all of this, and after each conversation it seemed they understood the situation, but then after 24 hours would repeat a script, with their final message saying

"I wanted to share the same information that was previously given to you, that the calculation would be done upon the total payout ($454.93) you had received divided by number of nights, and that was the reason why $227.46 was adjusted for that 1 night. And on 21st Dec, we do see that $227.46 had been issued as well along with other payouts together.
Our review is complete now, and we won’t be able to offer additional support on this case.
I’m going to close this thread now."

5. When looking into all this I found out that they did something similar. About a week before all this, we actually had a guest cancelation prior to a 7-day booking within the firm cancelation policy just before this and again had a different support agent issue a refund without authorization again to the same account with zero payout, so now we have close to negative $1000 on our account for refunds we didn't authorize nor did we even receive a payout for to begin with.

I have called support on these 2 cases multiple times now and I just don't get a response anymore. I actually found a 3rd case of this that happened a month ago and seem to keep finding additional issues the more I look into this. Not really sure what to do anyone, as I have wasted numerous hours and gotten nowhere with support.

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Mỹ-Ái0 Take Airbnb to the small claims court. They probably won't even defend themselves so you will win by default. If enough hosts take Airbnb to court then they may finally change their ways.

Not sure what you should claim for though - I think it is legally grey where Airbnb cancel on a guest even if the guest broke the rules. A safe claim would be for the correct calculation of the second night and full retention of the cleaning fee.

[Mỹ-Ái0]

I don't think it would go well for us to take them to court as we still want to be on the platform. We manage 18 total properties and would prefer not to be removed from the platform.