I appreciate that Airbnb is trying to step up protection of hosts, but the number of legitimate reservations getting blocked is getting unreasonable and causing lots of lost income, and hosts need control to override these blocks. Here are some examples (ones I know about...I'm sure there are plenty more where I don't), just in the past week where guests have been blocked from booking due to being at risk of partying:
1. Guest had a reservation cancelled on her after she arrived at property (with another host), tried to book same day with me for a 1 month+ stay, got blocked.
2. Guest was currently staying with me, didn't accept the change request in time, couldn't request a new reservation to stay 2 more weeks with me.
3. Guest who has stayed with me twice before, easygoing business traveler, getting blocked on a same-day booking for a guesthouse she has stayed in twice before with me without any issues.
Hosts need to have the ability to override in situations that they deem okay. At the VERY LEAST support needs to be able to make judgements to allow the booking, or override based on a host request and reasonable justification for why it's okay. I have had numerous support agents who agree there's no logical reason to block it, but they just can't do anything about it. A few months ago I had a woman needing to evacuate with her elderly parents and 2 dogs due to a fire and was panicking because we couldn't get the reservation to go through. In the end she had a personal friend who was an executive at Airbnb make the booking on her personal account, the fact that even an Airbnb exec couldn't push the booking through for her friend evacuating for a fire because the Airbnb algorithm decides she's a party risk is illogical. At a certain point we need to be able to use our human judgement when the algorithm is going haywire.