I have a cancellation fee issue also.
After several prompts/suggestions by AirBnB to enable automatic booking for my rental, I did do it.
(While this is besides the point here, I must mention that I do not recall seeing a policy text about cancellation fee when I enabled automatic booking for my AirBnB account)
On October 11, a non AirBnB guest who was staying at my rental place informed me that she would extend her stay for 2 more weeks. I tried immediately that same day to mark these dates as unavailable on my AirBnB calendar, but AirBnB would deny me access to ANY functionality on my account until I upload the scan of a government ID. This, I guess, must have been a very recent requirement as I never had such a request before.
Being out of town, in the countryside (in West Africa), with a terrible, quasi-inexistant Internet connection, no proper scanner around, I had to wait until my return 2 days later to satisfy this request.
On the very morning of my arrival back home, 2 days later, on October 13, I received a notification that my place had been booked for 11 days, starting on October 18. My current guest's stay was extended until October 25th.
Less than 20 minutes after this booking I wrote to the guest, apologized, informed him that the place was not available and canceled his reservation. 20 minutes after the booking.
I still couldn't mark those days as unavailable and had to get the government-issued ID scanned and uploaded to my account before I could do anything again on my account.
Despite this effective account suspension from AirBnB stopping me from updating my calendar for several days, AirBnB is now charging me a $100 fee for having canceled this booking.
It is strange to me that AirBnB penalizes me for having to cancel a booking made ONLY because it would not let me update my calendar, for its own internal administrative reasons. It's not a big deal cause it's only $100 but it seems very unfair to me.
(Of course, I have instantly disabled automatic booking).
I am not sure what can I do...?
Any advice will be much appreciated.
Many thanks.