Reservation cancelled with less than 24 hour notice

[Jewell2]

Airbnb has notified me that they cannot get in touch with our host, so they have cancelled our reservation with less than 24 hours notice. This reservation is for a house in Mexico. 

The only other options available start at $200 more expensive in total and Airbnb is refusing to pay the difference, giving us a $30 credit. 

What action can I take? I have non-refundable plane tickets and booked this rental long ago. Now I am being forced to pay another $200 to stay somewhere else when I have heard that Airbnb is charging the host $100 for cancelling. 

Might I add - this happened to me before in the past year and the host that cancelled on me ended up paying the difference out of pocket becasue Airbnb refused to help. 

[Sarah977]

@Jewell2  You say you booked this rental a long time ago, yet it seems you didn't bother to try to communicate with the host until just now and didn't get a response, and as Airbnb also didn't get a response they cancelled the reservation, correct? I don't really understand why you waited until a day or two before your check-in to realize that the host wasn't responding and notify Airbnb earlier, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.

It's terrible when hosts don't run their listings well, but you might have arrived to find there wasn't any such place, or they hadn't made a note of your reservation, so it's good that Airbnb cancelled, but I do understand your distress at not being able to find something that's not way more expensive. 

All I can suggest is that you try to talk to Airbnb again about this, asking for the case to be escalated if you don't get a better response.