Your local laws will dictate what a contract can and can't do, but generally contracts require a "meeting of the minds" and it's up to a court to decide what th

Your local laws will dictate what a contract can and can't do, but generally contracts require a "meeting of the minds" and it's up to a court to decide what that means and which clauses are actually enforceable (that's also why we have courts instead of the whole "code is law" crypto-dystopian BS, because not every possible edge-case can be predicted and written in the contract in advance). In this case the guest did not realize the bookings were nominative, and once he made aware, he wanted to change the booking to the proper person. A shortcoming of the Airbnb platform is that there is no way to transfer a booking to another account, so the only way is to cancel and rebook. Notice how at no point the guest's intention was to cancel and back out of the deal. The cancellation was suggested by the host themselves being unreasonable and trying to exploit a policy technicality to make a quick buck.