1) In January 2019, a tropical Storm hit Thailand during our vacation. The government shut down boats and planes to leave the island we were staying on. As a result, we lost non-refundable bookings on hotels, trains and planes to go back home "You should have taken an insurance, we were told, that's what they are for". OK.
2) March-June 2020, I have about 2000€ of airplanes booking for various members of my family (I have three grown-up children who study abroad) with 4 different companies. None of them refunded me. NONE - including the ones who had to cancel altogether their flights. All I have is coupons for future flights.
3) At the same time (it's where it's getting "funny"), we had 29 cancellations that we had to refund entirely because of Covid-19 because "don't-be-irrealistic/greedy/illegal-of-course-you-have-to-refund-if-people-can't-travel". Question: how is 3) different from 1) and 2)?
4)Even funnier: when we started 5 years ago, we decided for a strict cancellation policy to protect ourselves from the situation of crisis like the one we are living right now. Hosts with strict cancellation policy rent for lower prices -7% lower according to Airbnb. 7% of all our reservations since 2014 is about the same amount of money we are now going to lose in this crisis. To put it differently, had we chosen a flexible policy, taken the 7% extra-money and put it in a separate account, we could go through the next months unscathed... Isn't that hilarious?
