Hosts, guests scrambling after hundreds of Airbnb bookings cancelled in Toronto

Nearly a week after Brandon Wall lost all his guests' Airbnb reservations without warning, he's still working on rebooking them and struggling to get help from Airbnb to fix the issue.

On Friday, Wall received a panicked email from a guest asking why her reservation had been cancelled. He logged on and discovered all of his reservations were gone and his Airbnb listing, which had been active for six years, was taken down.

"It's been incredibly frustrating. It was extremely overwhelming the first day," Wall said.     

Wall isn't just any ordinary Airbnb host, he's what the company terms a "superhost" — someone who's well-established and a top performer on the platform.

But he still had to drop everything and spend hours trying to rebook the reservations while attempting to sort out the issue with Airbnb and the City of Toronto (Airbnb hosts must register with the city).

"All these guests are being hung out to dry and put in really bad situations," Wall said.

The city says it recently received nearly 100 inquiries from hosts like Wall who had their bookings cancelled. CBC Toronto spoke with a handful of them who shared a similar story: all their bookings were abruptly cancelled, the city confirmed their registrations were valid, Airbnb hasn't been helpful in addressing the problem and hosts have been scrambling to sort it out while trying to appease would-be guests.

The hosts, with help from city officials, eventually discovered the likely cause was a minor discrepancy in how their address is listed on their City of Toronto registration versus how it appears on their Airbnb profile. 

That led to the city flagging registered hosts after it ran a short-term rental compliance audit. The city sent the profiles to Airbnb, and instead of contacting the hosts to address the clerical error, the company automatically cancelled all their bookings.

In Phillip Tallman's case, the Airbnb superhost's apartment unit number was listed on a different line in one of his profiles — causing Airbnb to cancel all 46 of his bookings, including someone set to arrive the next day from England.

"I would say we lost probably 10 per cent of our bookings that we never got back," Tallman said. "[Guests] that just said, 'I'm done, I'm out, I'm not coming to Toronto.'"

Sandra Schott booked an Airbnb for a trip to Toronto from Pennsylvania to see a concert earlier this month. After her booking was abruptly cancelled in June, she booked another stay, which was also cancelled by Airbnb. 

She says she contacted the company, but didn't receive a response.

"It just gets a little frustrating, especially when you've got something to do on a certain date," Schott said.