airbnb overides my blocked calendar

[Rowena29]

Hi everyone,

I am REALLY hvaing a panic.

I am fairly new to airbnb, but careful and have spent much time on the community boards reading and learning.

I have had my home blacked out over the christmas new year period for several months. We are using ourselves with relatives

Periodically I get an special offer from airbnb suggesting I open up 28 Dec - ! Jan.

usually I ignore.

This morning I clicked "no thanks" and the offer disappeared

A few minutes later I DID activate a special to offer 25% discount on 5 and 6 Dec.

I got an alert to say I had done this and it immediately showed up on my calendar.

I have just recieved an instant book for 28 Dec - ! Jan for a ridiculously low amount on dates I absolutely KNOW were blacked out.

I know enough to know not to cancel myself - I immediatraely rang customer support who have apparenlty escalated to a case manager to look into but they may not call back for some time

I am really hoping they will handle it appropriately with no penalty to me - I assume so.

Regardless, this is extremely stressful, not to mention time consuming,  and really erodes my confidence in the platform. Even assuming it's sorted it still makes me look bad as a host as far as the guest is concerned.

How is this even possible?

Any suggestions/reassurances/insights would be much appreciated. - 

I did a quick search on the community pages and it seems this was a pattern in the US last year for special calendar dates - hosts complaining they were suddenly unblocked and instant booked

I am probably going on a bit, but all very unpleasant especially as I am working so hard to be professional and reliable.

Cheers!

[Susan151]

@Rowena29. This has been known to happen. You should contact AirBNB, keep your narrative simple, and get them to fix this. The narrative I would use is "the days have been blocked. I checked them yesterday. Someone instant booked. Please fix this with no penalty."

Leave out all the bits about annoying messages and discounts and whatever. Blocked, booked, remove this reservation without penalty. They should be willing to do this without issue.

[Rowena29]

Thanks so much Susan for replying.

Airbnb ended up XTREMELY cotacting me extremely quickly and sorted without issue - other than the dates remained unblocked and I had to quickly re block before someone ELSE booked.  

It does mess with your head a bit - I began to question whether I had inadvertenlty selected "accept offer" even though I KNOW that I didn't - so good  - sort of - to hear that it 's not an unknown occurrence and that I'm not losing the plot.

Many thanks!

[Rowena29]

UPDATE 

Airbnb responded EXTREMELY quickly and have cancelled with no penalty to me - however my dates were still available - i had to 

[Rowena29]

quickly get in and re block.

No explanation as to HOW this happened - other than it will be escalated to IT.

Still thinks it makes me look REALLY bad to the guest.

HO hum.

Posting this in case it helps someone else in a similar situation

Cheers