Bad Review From Guest on Airbnb

[Cam Bandstra]

My wife and I purchased a house hack and have been renting the upstairs unit on Airbnb. We recently had a guest who booked our place for an entire week (total payout to us was ~$1K). However, the guest never stepped foot in the unit. Instead, he called Airbnb claiming the neighborhood was not a safe place for him and his family and requested a full refund.

For context, the neighborhood is very up-and-coming (flips and new construction happening). In fact, our home was fully remodeled before we purchased it. However, I would not refer to the neighborhood as dangerous. We have not had any issues since living here and there are numerous families (with kids) that live on our street. Despite the neighborhood being up-and-coming, there is still plenty of work to be done. For example, there are several homes in close proximity that have boarded up windows, etc, and the area is clearly lower income than many other neighborhoods in Atlanta. 

Long story short, we chose not to issue a refund for the following reasons:

- We have had ~6 or so bookings in our first month on Airbnb and have an average ~4.8 stars. Not one of our guests has commented on the area, feeling unsafe, etc.

- We live in the basement of the home and do not believe the neighborhood to be dangerous (otherwise we would not have bought here and would not live here).

- We have a firm refund policy on our Airbnb listing that guests agree to when booking. Part of the policy is that we do not issue any refunds if a guest decides to cancel within a certain timeframe of their reservation (I believe within 24 hours of their booking).

- The week the guest booked was during July which is a busy time for this area.

For additional context, the guest never canceled the reservation and never stepped foot in the unit (he is probably trying to get Airbnb to force a refund). The day this all happened, I told him that if he chose to cancel and we were able to fill any of the nights during his booking window we would reimburse him for those nights. He did not accept that offer. 

With all of this said, I have two questions...

1) Obviously, he is going to leave a very bad review (he even drove around the neighborhood and took pictures of several of the rundown homes)... however, given he never even stepped foot inside our Airbnb, is there any way that we can have the review removed?

2) What would you have done in this situation? Would you have given a refund or doubled down on your refund policy?

Thanks in advance for all the help and advice!