Airbnb has a history of essentially ignoring their agreements with all of us hosts during the pandemic and refunding money we thought was ours when the guests clearly had no contractual or legal right to those refunds. There was and presumably still is at least one class action lawsuit against Airbnb about this but I'd suspect that all the plaintiffs have had their listings removed as retaliation. During the time this was going on, nobody at airbnb would answer the phone and you had to try to navigate one of those brutal phone systems designed not to let you even speak to the "customer service rep" that doesn't speak good english or know what they're doing anyway.
VRBO used strong-arm tactics against owners pressuring us to make refunds guests had no contractual or legal right to, moving us down in search rankings etc. Meanwhile, of course neither Airbnb or VRBO ever paid a mortgage or HOA or property tax bill that total about $9K a month for one of my Maui properties that sat empty for 7 months.
It's maddening how helpless owners can be. Unfortunately, whenever a company or small group of companies has a virtual monopoly in an industry, consumers can basically expect to pay an awful lot of money for inferior products and services.
