Dear Airbnb,
Thank you for the update.
I fully appreciate your efforts during this crisis in supporting the Airbnb community and especially the fact that you understood the impact of your decisions on guests as well as hosts such us myself.
I strongly feel that the decision imposed on us by yourselves in the email below is a serious step backwards. If you feel you should include this situation under your extenuating circumstances policy and give full refund to the guests who not be able to travel then by the same token you should extent your $250 million USD commitment to hosts to include such cases as well. Otherwise it seems to me that you do not have a clear strategy in place but rather that you just gave away $250 million in order to keep hosts quiet for a while.
You should advise your guests to take out travel insurance (you could even make money on this yourselves) to cover themselves for such risks. This is exactly the reason why you have a cancelation policy in place that may include a non-refundable sum. You should not try to mitigate these risks yourselves but rather have a clear policy which is enforced and let the insurance companies handle this risks.
I understand that only guests who are sick or unable to travel may be eligible for full refund, but then again you at Airbnb consider the cancelation of flights as extenuating circumstance, therefore, with the travel restrictions that are in place at the moment and until mid-June you basically cover almost all guests under the extenuating circumstance rule and you are going to give them full refund leaving us hosts to suffer once again.
All other major platforms including Booking.com and Expedia allowed the hosts to decide on how to proceed and encouraged the Voucher scheme.
I strongly suggest to you as a long time host to stick to your strategy for protecting the hosts and paying out of your own pocket the unilateral decision to grand full refunds to guests under the extenuating circumstance rule.
Thank you for your attention.