An Airbnb customer who was initially denied the rebooking of her Airbnb reservation under a “major events” policy near the Palisades wildfires in Los Angeles has received a full refund.
Ana Mostarac took to X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday to air her grievances with Airbnb’s policy after she tried to request help with rebooking her accommodation further away from the Palisades fires, which have burned through more than 17,000 acres this week, with other blazes contributing to destruction across the county and leaving a thousand structures destroyed.
Ms Mostarac posted a screenshot of the conversation with Airbnb ‘support ambassador’, which has now amassed 9.7 million views, with the ambassador stating that in her circumstance “this cancellation is not covered under our Major Disruptive Events Policy”.
The Airbnb ambassador she was speaking to then said that the host’s cancellation policy would apply in this case.
“To clarify, I called Airbnb to request help with rebooking accommodations farther from the danger zone,” said Ms Mostarac, adding that she was not demanding a refund.
“As always, their policies failed to account for context,” she added. “The fires keep getting worse, and unfortunately, many others are probably stuck explaining bushfires to someone in another country right about now.”
While Airbnb does offer rebooking services, its website does not list disruptive events as a cause to do so but states issues such as hosts’ failure to provide access, the accommodation is not clean and sanitary, contains safety or health hazards or the accommodation being significantly different than advertised.
Ms Mostarac booked her accommodation for the evening of 7 January, after the wildfires started.
Airbnb’s Major Disruptive Events Policy states that guests are covered if certain events affect their reservation location, occur after the time of booking and prevent or legally prohibit completion of a future or ongoing reservation.
The events covered include public health emergencies and epidemics, government travel restrictions, military actions and other hostilities, large-scale outages of essential utilities and natural disasters.
Since Ms Mostarac’s post, Airbnb has contacted the…
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