They do not. I cited this exact policy and it fell on deaf ears. I couldn't believe it myself -- maybe I should write a dedicated post about the details just for visibility.

Setting aside freeqaz's response to you explaining that they do in fact not follow the policies on that page, even if they did it wouldn't mean they "find you a new place". It says right on that page that they'll find you a new place _or_ refund you. A last-minute refund is basically airbnb doing nothing at all.

Had this experience w/ vrbo:

- support didn't offer to find a new last-minute place for our big group, but they did say they'd cover a new place

- basically 0% availability, so only $$$$ places left, and multiply that by a big group: 5-figure bill for lodging

- vrbo explicitly agreed to cover it after going through internal approvals, so we pulled the trigger. big event and clock was ticking before we'd be sleeping on the streets, so we were relieved.

- ... and then I got shafted with a 5-figure bill because, after-the-fact, they put up bureaucratic hurdles & denied our claim

After that shockingly fraudulent experience, I did some googling, and apparently this is common practices to all big players in this space. Multiple (winning) class action lawsuits.

On the plus side, better motivation for our business: we do gpu graph visualization & graph neural networks to help companies detect & prevent this kind of behavior based on all sorts of account metadata (transactions, image forensics, IPs, clickstreams) so personally motivated to help others target the bad guys causing problems for everyone else :)