This seems to be completely different than the experience I had. In my case, I was the guest and my flight to Ireland (from the US) was less than 12 hours from the time I received a last minute email from AirBnB letting me know that the host canceled my reservation for no reason and without providing any reasons.
AirBnB made every effort to remove themselves from the equation so that they are not held liable and refused to:
1) intervene and force the host to commit to reservations I have made a year in advance,
2) to impose any fines and punitive damages for the last minute cancelation.
AirBnB pretended, and I wholeheartedly say "pretended" because it was a staged attempt to help, to help find me an alternative place in which none was available for a "last minute booking", and ones that were were far from where I wanted to be and a lot more expensive specially given that it's a last minute reservations. Ultimately, I had found a host who, graciously, understood my dire situation and luckily had an available room. It was more expensive and farther from where I wanted to be, but it was closer in comparison to some of the other limited options i found.
Because the original host canceled my reservations, I had no way to review the host and give him a negative review. I had a big argument with AirBnB for not allowing me to give a review and their reasons were "You can only review hosts you stayed with". So the fact that I didn't stay at the host property because he decided to F*ck me up the last minute and cancel my reservations disqualifies me from submitting a review against the host. What a shady business practice AirBnB.
I reached out to the original host via AirBnB email demanding reasons for f*cking me over like that the last minute and I got a lousy closed-ended response of "For medical reasons, i need to move in into this room" without any sympathy, or details. Was completely unacceptable and total fluff.