Have you ever been in a situation where you as a host needed to cancel your guest reservation? It could be for various reasons. Maybe your property had some unexpected maintenance. Maybe you accidentally left your calendar open when it shouldn’t have been, or maybe you got an instant book from a guest that looks pretty suspicious and you think that they’re probably going to be breaking your house rules.

There is a right way to cancel a guest reservation, and there is definitely a wrong way that could cost you fees. It could get your calendar blocked and it could tank your listing visibility. So today we’re jumping into our quick playbook for how to cancel guest reservations as a host penalty free.

Stay tuned, we’ll cover all the bases.

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Richest podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. Let’s just go ahead and get right into it. What are the steps for canceling a guest reservation? Penalty free. [00:01:00] The first thing you’re going to want to do is just assess the situation. There’s lots of reasons where you can actually penalty free, cancel a guest reservation.

Airbnb has them listed right on their site, so I’m just gonna go ahead and read some of them off. Circumstances beyond the host control, such as major damage to a home listing, emergency repairs, like a gas leak or a burst pipe, or unexpected issues with the service or experience venue that prevent hosting, that would be your property, right?

Serious personal illness that prevents hosting

Proof that a guest intends to break one of the house rules included in the home listing details, have an unauthorized party or otherwise violate our party and events policy. If you missed our episode on house rules, go back and check that out. You can get a copy of our exact house rules.

Of course, you can adjust them to how you see fit for your property. But I guarantee there’s a few on there you don’t have on yours.

The challenge [00:02:00] is if you don’t have all of your house rules up to date and you see that a upcoming guest is going to violate something that doesn’t fit well with your property, but that’s not an existing house rule, then you can’t cancel the reservation. So double check that all your house rules are in place and up to.

You can also cancel reservation penalty free if there’s a major disruptive event. So this could be a declared public health emergency or government travel restrictions.

So you’ve assessed the situation, you know why you should be able to cancel that guest reservation penalty free. Next step is to collect evidence. So did the guest send some sort of message that goes against one of your house rules? Did they book the property for four people, but your property’s only suited for two?

That is a violation. You wanna make sure you have all those message threads and maybe your property just isn’t available because you had some sort of big maintenance issue. Well, you wanna make sure that you have photos and invoices, anything and everything that you need to [00:03:00] support your case because if you don’t support it well enough, you could risk getting a penalty.

More on that in a second.

So with all of your evidence gathered, you’re going to want to open a resolution with Airbnb or open a case with Airbnb. You’re gonna do that through the Help Center, the Resolution Center, and there you’re going to attach all of your evidence, any guest information, any guest messages, anything like that.

If you had a reservation that wasn’t last minute, you always have to go through Airbnb support to cancel the last minute ones. But let’s say you had one that was a couple weeks out and you’re very sure that you have the evidence to support. Justifying a cancellation, well then you can actually do it on your own.

So you’re simply gonna go into your Airbnb portal. You’re gonna go online, you’re gonna go to reservations, find the one that you want to cancel. There is a cancel reservation button. It’s gonna ask you a series of questions. You can put in your answers, and then ultimately you can cancel.  I just wanna reiterate that if you do have a reservation canceled and you didn’t provide good [00:04:00] enough evidence, or there wasn’t a valid reason, it will really hurt your search rankings, your listing visibility, and it’s gonna show right on the listing.

Next up, you want to communicate with the guests. Of course, it’s important that we’re empathetic with them, right? Because they booked your property for a vacation or whatever it happened to be, and it’s not great news knowing that their travel plans are changing or they’re going to need to find another place.

So you’ll wanna send a message similar to this one. We’ve encountered an unexpected issue at the property that prevents us from hosting safely, hosting safely. Those are important words there. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and are already in touch with Airbnb to process the cancellation properly.

Your refund and rebooking options will be handled directly through the platform.

Now next up are rebooking options. So if this is a case where the guest actually checks out, okay, and you don’t think they’re going to violate any rules and you have other dates available, or maybe you’re a property manager and you have [00:05:00] other properties available, then you’re going to wanna offer those rebooking options.

Remember that having a cancellation on your listing profile, it shows up. People see that, and it really hurts your negative visibility. 

so if you’re at all unsure that they might not accept that cancellation penalize you, it’s recommended to go through their support first. 

And Airbnb’s going to see this as a way to resolve the issue. So you’re not going to be penalized as long as your guest communication shows that the guest agreed to this. If you’ve reached out and actually asked the guest to cancel, that’s a no-no, and you could get penalized.

This was actually the way that our team used to do it, because it’s really the quickest and fastest if you reach out and say, Hey, my water heater exploded and there’s water all over my property. Unfortunately, we’re not gonna have the property available for you on your check-in date. A lot of times they understand and they cancel from their end, but if there’s any sort of pushback and they cancel from their end and then they later tell [00:06:00] Airbnb that you encourage them to cancel, then you’re still gonna get stuck with those penalties.

And that could be a fine, that could be a blocked calendar, and it surely will be drastically lowered visibility with your listing on the platform.

So that’s really the end of the process. You’re going to let Airbnb take it from there. But it is possible that after submitting all of your evidence and communicating that they still penalize you. So a last step is to dispute their penalty.

if you went through the process and Airbnb officially canceled the reservation, but they still penalized you, make sure to revisit the valid reasons that you as a host can actually cancel a reservation. And those do include. Things that have to do with the guests and just your security for the property.

So reading directly from their website if the guest has several unfavorable reviews or a lack of profile information that concerns the host. [00:07:00] That is a valid reason potentially to cancel the reservation. And so if you got penalized, make sure to revisit this. Include this information as your evidence for why you had the reservation canceled. Sometimes their support is interpreting it differently. You wanna make sure that they know that you follow the rules.

so canceling a reservation’s, never fun for you or the host, but by following our quick playbook, you can ensure that you can get those reservations canceled, protect your properties, and make sure that you’re canceling penalty free. 

So remember, the key is just to act quickly, to communicate clearly. Always put your guest experience first.

Document everything. Make sure to get Airbnb’s support team involved, and until next week, I hope you have a fabulous week.