@Sarah977
It's crazy really.
You probably won't remember, but at the beginning of the pandemic, I had two cases where guests were wrongly refunded. Both were long term guests, so would normally be required to pay for the month following their cancellation and be refunded the rest. As both had checked in already, they were not covered by Airbnb's COVID EC policy.
One of the guests was perfectly happy to pay for that month because her university had confirmed they would cover it. The other guest was also fine with it initially and later asked if I could refund her more, which I agreed to. Airbnb CS spoke with both and all seemed okay until a series of mistakes, almost a comedy of errors.
To cut a long story short, CS refunded both guests not only for the remainder of their stays, but for nights they had already stayed with me. In one case, the guest was refunded the entire stay, including the two weeks she had already spent with me, and was told to sort out the payment directly with me!!! Once she had her refund, this guest said she would pay me back at some later date. Right now was not convenient as she was waiting for a refund on another Airbnb, had lost money on theatre tickets etc.
I was outraged. How could CS do this? Given the circumstances, giving the guests a full refund for unspent nights even if it was in breach of the EC policy, was understandable. Giving a guest an entirely free stay at my expense is quite another!
I cannot begin to tell you how much time I spent battling this and how much I got the run around from CS, but it was around a month of constant chasing for both cases. In the end, CS had to admit that they had screwed up and refund me every penny out of their own coffers because the guests and their refunds were long gone.
I know that CS was a total mess at the time, but really? The most difficult part of dealing with CS is that, if they make a mistake (no matter how obvious), they seem to go to any length to deny it. This was not actually a complicated situation and could have been sorted out in one phone call, not a whole month of endless calls and messages.