Guest can canceled and we got charged a fee

[Enchanted3]

We had a guest cancel his reservation and Airbnb charged us $313 and blocked off the entire week. So not only we don’t get paid for the reservation, we have to pay Airbnb money out of our pocket, and we have no way to host for the week that they were supposed to stay. Has anyone else had this happen? It feels very unfair. All of this because we were unable to answer the phone for 60 minutes. 

[Frances3408]

@Enchanted3. Thanks for the heads up. Do you Instant Book? This could be unrelated, but I got an email from that other platform on 1st October and from 1 Jan they are imposing new rules (with penalties- not spelt out) that will require all sorts of ridiculous requirements including above mentioned host response times. .

"The Host Communication Policy outlines the expected timeframes for hosts to provide check-in instructions and reply to guests’ queries, preventing stay-related issues. You must provide a resolution to the specific issue or inform the guest when it will be resolved. Using an ‘automatic reply’ is not sufficient" ... For example a 2-4 night booking will require a within 12 hours response time....On the guest’s check-in day and during their stay: answer within 1 hour (for messages received between 8 am and 9 pm in the property’s time zone.

So either they are already reading from the same playbook or its coming here shortly...

[Enchanted3]

Yes, I believe that it is related. We were able to appeal the decision and ended up getting it resolved in our favor since we could prove that we had done everything right. But it was an extremely stressful experience and the guests behaved very badly and there were no consequences for them. We have experienced many guests getting away with lying and cheating on this platform. They really don’t do anything about it. We once had a guest instabook who had 3 different complaints about them and they did the exact same thing to us and got away with it. It cost us a few hundred dollars. Now we don’t instabook, but still run into guests getting away with lying and cheating. It would be nice if the platform would vet guests and keep track of their behavior.