A penalty is an amount applied to your host account to be deducted from a future payout.

As a host, you might accrue penalties for a couple of reasons:

If you cancel a guests booking, in most situations you'll receive a cancellation penalty. The amount varies depending on how much notice you give the guest and the reason for cancelling.

Learn more about host cancellation penalties.

We send host payouts 24 hours after the guest checks in. If a booking needs to be cancelled or changed and refunded after a payout has already been sent to you, we'll add a penalty to your host account to recover the refunded amount. The penalty will then be deducted from a future booking.

For example, let's say Meg has booked for four nights, and two days into her stay there is a property maintenance problem that means she must check out early. As the host, you would have already been paid out for the full stay so to refund Meg for the remaining two nights, a penalty will be added to your host account.