Airbnb refused to refund $2,317 — a significant portion of the department’s academic conference budget — to UC Berkeley’s geography department until The Daily Californian reached out to company representatives for comment.
The Airbnb reservation was in relation to a new art exhibit, “Jerusalem Through the Seams of Memory,” that features stories collected in Jerusalem and its surrounding villages over the last decade. The exhibit was created by Samar Awaad, a culinary artist and storyteller, and Saad Amira, the head of Urban Studies and Spatial Practices at Al-Quds Bard College. Both Awaad and Amira are Palestinian.
The exhibit, inspired by an earlier production shown in the West Bank in October 2025, invites visitors to explore the lived stories of Palestinians through oral testimonies, photographs and maps. According to Sherine Ebadi, a PhD candidate in the geography department who helped organize the exhibit, it encompassed a year’s worth of research and organization.
Awaad and Amira were supposed to stay at the Airbnb to open the exhibition March 21. However, days before their scheduled departures March 13, their flights were canceled due to airspace closure amid the United States and Israel’s joint attacks on Iran.
Ebadi said it was “heartbreaking” that Awaad and Amira were unable to attend the exhibit’s opening.
“It was just so unfair,” Ebadi said. “Here we are trying to tell these stories at this time, and yet again, it’s so hard to tell them.” She said it was difficult to quantify Amira’s and Awaad’s contributions to the exhibit because they had been collecting stories on the ground with Palestinians over the course of a decade.
The geography department was able to get a full refund for Awaad and Amira’s canceled flight. However, when Ebadi attempted to obtain a full refund from Airbnb — citing its Major Disruptive Event Policy, which includes acts of war, invasions and bombings — the company refused.
In transcripts of Ebadi’s correspondence with Airbnb, an Airbnb support ambassador cited that the company’s Major Disruptive Events Policy only permits refunds if the location of the Airbnb is directly impacted by conflict. Oakland, the site of the Airbnb reservation, did not meet that definition, the ambassador emphasized.
“We’ve worked very hard for the past year to bring an exhibit to Oakland. If we lose the money from this reservation, we will not be able to travel at a future date,” Ebadi wrote in her correspondence with Airbnb. “The war has been an incredibly heartbreaking and stressful situation for all, and we are hoping we can find a way for a full refund so that when things settle down, we can still make the trip happen.”
As political violence grows in the Middle East, more and more people have had to contend with the limits of Airbnb’s policy.
Business Insider previously reported that Airbnb refused to refund other customers traveling from the Middle East whose plans had been impacted by war.
“For a small university thing, being out $2,000 is huge for us,” said Ebadi. “It’s tragic, because we actually need that (money) to have them here and host them.”
Airbnb eventually granted the geography department a full refund only after the Daily Cal contacted representatives about Ebadi’s situation.
Ebadi said it was difficult to open the exhibit without Amira and Awaad.
“I just had to spend (an) entire five minutes that I spoke just acknowledging their presence in the room, despite not being able to physically be there,” Ebadi said. “This is really sad for us that they’re not able to see what we’ve been spending so much time doing.”
Still, Ebadi emphasized that the exhibit’s aim — to build solidarity across communities and to tell stories rooted in Palestinian history — could still be recognized and understood.
The exhibition will be on display until May 21.