Lay My Hat

Accepted a booking today. Now not showing in inbox. Does this happen with 48 hour cancellation?

AirBnB response

For privacy reasons I am not able to say why your reservation was canceled, but I will note that this was canceled for your security, safety and in the best interest of your listing based on the information we had received of your guest.

Very impressed with their response via Twitter.

Now this.

Your reservation was not a scam, the user is simply not able to book with us after we ran a background check on them. We have disabled this user from booking on our site for all of our host's safety and concern.

Surely checks are done before guests can book?

As we received a booking form emailed guest key code and address.

Very worrying.

For whatever reason, although it is probably a good one, it appears that this guest is on AB&B's "black list". But AB&B were too late in picking up on it in relation to your (now cancelled) booking. I think it is a precaution against being sued for defamation that AB&B don't want to go into details about the person.

It might be wise to change the key code and informing other future guests (if any), who would be relying on the existing code, of the change.

I asked why checks were not done before booking was accepted.

Our site runs those checks randomly and this user was able to book before we were able to run that check on them. Our system recognized that something was off which is why this was automatically canceled upon booking.

We were not informed by ABB this booking had been cancelled. It was by chance I noticed it had disappeared from ABB inbox.

The guest has now enquired via OD and left a message with us last night.