In a case I am still trying to find someone in AirBNB support to understand, in mid-June 2023 I had a $1,600 balance due on a booking for late July. I used a $1,000 AirBNB gift card to make a payment, even though no payment was due for another month. Afterward the confirmation screen in my browser properly showed that the $1,000 from the gift card was accepted, and $600 remained due by July 17. So far so good. But when I looked at the confirmation message in my email, I saw that the system didn't do what it said - instead, it took the $1,000 gift card payment but also charged my credit card on file the remaining $600 right then, a month in advance of when it was due, without my consent, and contrary to what it said in the browser it was going to do.
Bugs happen, I understand that. This is not about the cost of a few dollars to me for not being able to make payments in the way I had planned. It could have been worse if someone had needed to preserve available balance on their credit card or something. I have spent hours trying to get the company to understand that they have a payments bug that is making unauthorized charges. But the 6 or 8 support people who have been involved with this case all have such poor understanding of nuances expressed in English that I still haven't gotten the point across.
I had been a happy customer and I am a stockholder. I have been trying to use this experience to help the company fix a problem that could cause serious hardship for someone. But I'm almost done. I'm not going to charge back the payment because I expect that would cause the inept support to cancel my reservation. I have asked for escalation to senior US-based support. If this is not resolved soon I'm just going to switch to VRBO. What an incredibly dense and stupid company AirBNB has become.
Moral of the story: make no payment before it is due, and prepare for the system to charge your credit card for the entire remaining balance if you pay a portion with a gift card, even though it tells you it did not.
