We are currently hosting guests who originally booked for 10 weeks.
Now, 4 weeks into their stay, they’ve submitted a request to shorten the booking to 9 weeks (they love our place but have found a permanent home to move into).
Since there are still more than 30 nights remaining before the new checkout date, the request was automatically approved by Airbnb without any option for me to review or approve it - which is annoying but expected.
When we accepted the booking in June, our pricing settings were as follows (note: all dollar amounts are illustrative, and I’m ignoring the 3% service fee and cleaning fees for simplicity):
- Nightly rate: $150
- Custom length-of-stay discounts:
- 8 weeks = 12%
- 10 weeks = 15%
Based on these settings, the original booking would have had a payout of $8,925 (70 x $150 x 85%).
When the guest shortened their stay to 9 weeks - we expected the new payout to be $8,316 (63 x $150 x 88%).
However, the revised payout is only $7,087. This is because Airbnb applied a 25% discount to the ENTIRE booking, including the nights that have already passed and been paid (63 x $150 x 75%).
Essentially, I’m now refunding my guest for previous nights simply because they shortened their stay.
It appears, that the 25% discount Airbnb applied to the updated booking is the monthly discount currently set in settings of the listing.
Here is my question: Can anyone confirm what discount rate should have been applied when the guest submitted their change request? I’ve spoken to or chatted with at least 10 Airbnb representatives, but I still haven’t received any clarification on this issue.
It seems unreasonable to me that the current discount rate of the listing would be applied retroactively to an existing booking. For example, since accepting the original booking, a host might have adjusted their discount rate alongside an increased nightly rate. Airbnb’s system seems to apply any pricing changes - whether temporary or meant for future stays - retrospectively, and without host approval.
To complicate matters further, In this specific case, we used custom length-of-stay discounts (8 weeks / 10 weeks), a feature that has since been removed. The monthly discount now applied to the updated booking was automatically set by Airbnb as a replacement for the deprecated feature, and is not even something we configured ourselves.
