@ Everybody
All this bickering about who was eligible for a payout is just BS.
The root cause of all this is Airbnb administering an EC policy biased against their 'partners', us hosts, by removing their - our - only advance planning tool - the cancellation policy. Covid-19 is a difficult circumstance to navigate, but hosts are more than capable of reaching whatever agreement would have been necessary, and those who have experience of direct contracts with guests will understand that amicable solutions are easily found without advantage being taken by any party.
All other platforms, in the majority of cases, allowed hosts to administer their cancellation policies in line with the contracts set out between Guest and Host. 'Being in this together' does include Guests being in the mix with many of those benefitting from furlough schemes, welfare support and a variety of other income replacement schemes. This support is not available to many Airbnb hosts so those hosts are financing guests' lack of insurance policies after having had their income significantly reduced, this imposed by Airbnb.
Airbnb are no way any benefactor in this, they are Highway robbers. Unlike 'Robin Hood' - stealing from the rich to pay the poor, they're robbing from the poor to pay a percentage back to the poor they first stole from, and distributing that in a discriminatory manner.
Would anybody really be arguing about their eligibility to be less abused should the right decision have made in the beginning of this whole pandemic (not endemic as EC then stipulated)? I doubt it. Each host would be responsible for their own actions. Whatever they turned out to be.
Every host is eligible for a grant equal to the amount of income they lost. Simple. Fix that Airbnb.