Guest left early, now what?

[Kaylee41]

I had a guest book for 30 nights.  After 3 nights, the next evening, I find out she left and wants a refund for the remaining nights.

Because she left and decided not to stay on the fourth night, it cost me that night plus the following night (tonight) because I’m still cleaning and laundering.

My questions/concerns:

• I want to make sure the days I refund her will become available again immediately so I can get the room booked again.

• I have a strict cancelation policy, yet I don’t want someone in my home who doesn’t want to be here.

• I am a Super Host and don’t want my status affected or a bad review.  Can she still review me if she decides to leave early?

• Should she handle this through the app or by contacting AirBnB or should I alter her length of stay myself?  Does it make a difference?

• AirBnB hasn’t responded to me in hours and if they keep lagging it’s going to continue affecting my availability.  Can I create a new listing for the same room so I can get it booked?  Does that violate any policies?

[Emanuele352]

I have the same issue, the guest left and she is elderly and doesn't know how to cancel and I can't reach her. We want to give her a refund for the remaining days because her leaving is understandable.

Can we not cancel from the Host end ? Will that leave a bad rating or is there a way around that ?

[Helen744]

@Emanuele352 Call and explain to Airbnb that it was the guests decision to leave. They can cancel for the guest if this is in messaging . If the guest does not correspond through messaging it is always important that you acknowledege their request to leave on the messaging platform... H

[Emanuele352]

Yes thank you, that's what I did. They cannot reach the guest so they can't take listing off but that's fine, keeping the money for the remaining days. 

[Bob297]

@Kaylee41 
Some guests use it as a trick to get a discount for 30 days
If you are offering her a refund, charge her for the full price of the remaining days you can't rebook.

[Kya0]

My other issue on this end is that, in our case we offer a special price for longer stays, so if a guest books for more than 30 days, they get a discount, but if they leave after lets say 15 days, and request a refund they expect a refund of half the stay, even though your earning on shorter than a month stay have a different price. That happened to us with a reservation for a month and 2 days, that after 2 weeks they decided to cancel, by the way: fair good guests. But their expectations were to received half their payment. But we actually lost in the business transaction since the discount of a longer than a month stay gets a 20% off versus a 2 week stay that gets a 10% off.

[Sandra856]

@Kya0 You don’t owe the guests a refund - if they decide to leave early they will have to cancel and when they cancel from their side (without your interference) they will automatically get refunded according to the long term cancellation policy. It means they wouldn’t get a refund. The system is set up to automatically refund the guest whatever the guest is entitled to according to the bookings cancellation policy. You could explain to them that they had already received a big discount and you had blocked the calendar so no one else could book. That you unfortunately are not able to refund outside the cancellation policy but that you would gladly refund should someone else rebook once they have cancelled and the calendar is open and available to new guests. (The calendar automatically opens up the second the guest cancels). That is fair. It is not fair that the guests believe they don’t have to acknowledge the cancellation agreement they agreed to when they booked.