Frankly, I have never seen a successful business that would intentionally cut the feeding hand, and this is exactly what is going on here (literally). Airbnb is nothing without a large group of dedicated hosts who spend time, money, and significant efforts to ensure their guests have the best experiences possible. Airbnb has no tangible assets to be able to make any kind of sustainable profit. The only reason it exists is because of the people opening their personal properties to complete strangers that we can’t even see a picture of until we agree to accept a booking. And yet, it appears that Airbnb firmly believes that making the TOS less and less favorable to hosts is a successful path forward. They appear to feel their superiority by easily overriding host cancellation policies, suspending listings for no reason based on unproven accusations (what happened to the presumption of innocence?), allowing bogus reviews for someone who did not even stay at the property, etc.
Personally, if this new refund policy is enacted, I will snooze my listings so I don’t accept any booking requests under the new policy, honor the existing bookings, and delete my account. Enough is enough!
The more hosts leave Airbnb, the better chance there is that someone at the top would finally look at the bottom line and realize that building a community of trust can’t be done by giving a one-sided advantage to the guests. This appears to have been Airbnb strategy lately and the latest change is just another confirmation. I am really surprised that Airbnb does not realize that trust is very fragile and something that is very difficult to build, very easy to lose, and almost impossible to regain…