@Sarah977I hope all is well with you!
Just to clarify, I still haven't gotten to the bottom of this, because I am waiting for some info from the guest, but it occurred to me after I posted about this, that the guest hasn't been charged 50%. She has potentially been charged (or they are trying to charge her) 100%.
This guest's stay is not (yet) covered by the COVID-19 policy and she is a long-term guest, so was supposed to get charged for the first month and refunded the rest. I didn't understand why she was only being charged 600 Euros + fees and neither did she.
Then I remembered that the guest pays a fair amount upfront when they book. Most likely, she already paid Airbnb for the first month + the all the fees (the latter they are now keeping as travel credits). The 600 Euros is supposed to be her refund, or rather the amount that she can no longer be charged. She told me that, when she went to cancel, the system told her she would only be refunding booking fees. But why?
Even more baffling is the message I got, which was that, as I had been previously notified (erm, no I hadn't), they were unable to collect payment from the guest and therefore I would receive no payout. One of two things has happened here. Either they have taken the guest's money and for some reason are not paying any of it to me (so I couldn't give her any refund even if I wanted to), or, they genuinely couldn't take her payment but failed to tell me.
I find the second reason HIGHLY UNLIKELY. The guest booked months ago and, other than the confirmation email, I've had no correspondence from Airbnb about the booking. If they were unable to take a payment from her back then, why didn't they do something about it, or cancel the booking when they couldn't get payment? I can see why something like that could happen in the current chaos, but not when she booked...
So, I have asked her to check her accounts and let me know exactly what she had already been charged so I can take it up with Airbnb, but they have totally messed up all recent cancellations, so I have no faith in them to fix this, yet another, massive balls up.