Understanding Response Rate and Acceptance Rate

[Airbnb]

For many of you, hosting is important, but you’ve also got work, family, and your personal life keeping you plenty busy. So, tracking how quickly you reply to guest inquiries and monitoring the percentage of booking requests you’re accepting versus declining is probably not on the top of your to-do list. Some of you have asked about the specifics of these measurements, why they matter, and how you can improve them without much fuss—and we’re happy you asked! We’ve gathered answers from the folks who build these tools, so let’s dive in to see what they have to say.

What’s the difference between my response rate and acceptance rate?

• Your response rate measures how consistently you respond within 24 hours to guest inquiries and booking requests. You can find your response rate from the last 365 days by clicking on the Progress tab, then clicking Basic Requirements.
• Your acceptance rate measures how often you accept or decline reservations. Guest inquiries are not included in the calculation of your acceptance rate. You can see your acceptance rate from the last 365 days by clicking on the Progress tab, then clicking Basic Requirements.

For my response rate, does just the first message/inquiry count or do subsequent messages in a thread count, too?

We only measure a response within 24 hours of the guest's first message or inquiry. Subsequent messages in that thread do not impact your response rate.

What happens to my acceptance rate if I answer a question rather than approve, pre-approve, or decline a booking request?

The short answer is this: If a guest sends you a booking request and you only answer a question, but do not approve or decline before the request times out, that counts as a decline.

Let’s dive in a little further. It’s important to note the difference between an inquiry and a booking request. An inquiry is just a message—perhaps asking to clarify something about amenities, dates, or House Rules. The guest may be interested in staying with you and may even ask something like: “I want to book your home; is it ok if I bring my dog?” This is not a booking request. It’s an inquiry. You can respond to an inquiry with an answer, a pre-approval, or by declining. Declining an inquiry signals to the guest that their needs aren’t a good fit for your space and encourages them to request another listing. But none of these actions directly affects your acceptance rate. If you pre-approve an inquiry and the guest books your space, that counts as an acceptance. If you pre-approve and they don’t book, it doesn’t have any effect on your acceptance rate. And if you decline an inquiry, your acceptance rate is not affected.

A booking request means that the guest is officially asking to book your listing and is waiting for you to accept or decline. As far as your acceptance rate goes, we only measure the final outcome of the booking request, and there are just three possible actions you can take: accept, decline, or let the request time out. If you let a request time out—even if you answer questions but take no action to approve or decline a request within 24 hours—that’s considered a decline.

How do these rates affect me as a host?

That’s a great question. The technical answer is that low response rates can impact your eligibility for the  Superhost  program, and acceptance rates can impact eligibility to become a Plus host. And hosts who have very low rates could face penalties, including having their listings paused. But, it's important to note that one-off instances of not responding or declining a booking request rarely lead to any action being taken. We’re much more concerned where we see a consistent pattern of non-response or declines.

Can you share insider tips or suggestions on how to keep my response and acceptance rates high?

We think hosts are actually the experts in this area, so we’ll share some of your ideas here, too, but for response rate, one of the best ways to manage messages on the go is to use the Airbnb app on your mobile phone. You can also consider temporarily snoozing your listing if you know you’ll be unable to respond to messages for a while. If you’re taking a vacation, attending a long work conference, or just needing to unplug for a while, you can rest easy knowing there’s no response clock ticking or messages piling up in your inbox.

To snooze your listing and hide it from search results for a set period of time:

1. Go to Your listings and select a listing
2. Click Listing Details
3. Next to Listing status, click Edit
4. Under Listing status, select Snoozed from the dropdown menu
5. Enter the start and end dates, then click Save

Your listing will automatically reactivate when the timeframe you set is over. The day before your listing reactivates, you'll get a reminder email.

Here are some tips hosts in the Community Center share for keeping your response rate high:

• Set aside daily time to reply to requests and inquiries.
• Have a co-host or a friend respond for you if you’re unavailable and don’t want to snooze your listing.
• Save time by pre-writing responses to commonly asked questions. Look for the “Use a Saved Message” prompt in any active message thread you have with a guest. You can create, use, and re-use responses there.
• If you’re very busy or your hosting business really takes off, consider hiring a virtual assistant.

For your acceptance rate, ensure your calendar and booking preferences and settings are accurate and up to date. For example, if you can't accommodate same-day requests, update your listing to reflect the time you need between reservations. Hosts also tell us they find it helpful to keep their house rules updated so that guests understand what’s ok and what isn't before submitting a booking request. You’re less likely to get requests you can’t accept if you’re very clear about your expectations.

What is Airbnb doing to avoid penalizing hosts' acceptance rate when they decline unfit or illegitimate requests?

We understand that sometimes you may get requests that clearly violate your House Rules, or that are actually marketing attempts disguised as booking requests. These can put you in the awkward position of having to risk harming your own acceptance rate when there’s not a better action to take. To address this, the first thing we need to do is help you flag to us when there’s a problem. We’re exploring how best to do this, and while we don’t have a feature to announce at this time, we are absolutely aware of this pain point for you.

We want to ensure you’re empowered to decide who you welcome into your home and that you’re comfortable with the guests who stay with you. We understand that you only want to be held accountable to legitimate booking requests, and we’re committed to making sure that happens.

Numbers are just part of the story

While it’s good to keep response and acceptance rates in mind, the bigger picture isn’t about these measurements—in fact, they’re just indicators of the actual hospitality you show to your guests and the connection you establish when they reach out to you. You impact your guest’s experience from the moment they contact you or request to book, and the host community rightfully takes a lot of pride in creating experiences of welcome and belonging for the people who stay in your listings. So, yes, please do care about communicating in a timely way and setting guests up for success while they’re trying to find a good listing match for their needs; but know that numbers are just one way to tell the story about how you host.

[SandraandGary0]

Honestly, I never really looked into this topic, until recently I found out, that our response rate is too less to apply for Airbnb Plus and decreased extremely during the last months. I guess, one of our last booking requests, which actually later got confirmed but needed more than 24 hours to clarify the situation, is one of the reasons why this happened. And this really kind of sucks - especially because we were ready to go ahead with our Airbnb Plus submission!

Therefore I talked to the support team today and found out, that you really have to accept or decline within 24 HOURS to have no negative impact on your response rate. 

From our point of view, this sometimes can be really to less time. Especially, when the booking time is more than 1 month in the future or the current tenant is a change situation.

Unfortunately, what happened happened and cannot not be changed, but I decided to make a suggestion about a new kind of Extension Feature for the Accepting/Declining of a booking request.

I would like to know what you guys think about it. And maybe your feedback to this suggestion helps to bring this as a new feature.

Do you have similar problems? 

How do you solve it?

Would you also like to have such a feature or have another suggestion how to solve this problem for us?

Here's what I wrote:

Currently we only have 24 hours to either accept or decline a guest's reservation request. Often this is not enough to verify the situation. Such as, that the guest hasn't given enough information and doesn't come back with an answer to our questions in time, or we need more time to clarify the room situation with other guests (e. g. sometimes we have longterm guests living with us month by month, so we first have to clarify the situation with our existing tenants).

Therefore it would be nice to have a feature where it would be possible to say "I need more time before I accept or decline", and then have the chance to maybe choose between 24, 48 or 72 hours.
To make sure, that's also in the interest of and aligned with the guest who made the request, you could integrate a kind of approval from the guest - which would also be like a proof, that the guest has been informed and agrees to this longer period.

This would help us a lot! Because we really have these situations and totally messed up our response rate because of that, because we did not want to be rude and decline and then ask the guest to make another request when we figured out that we can host him.

Thank you! Appreciate your feedback!

[Shar-Bacchus0]

It's not fair to penalize the host for declining inappropriate reservations.  Over 90% of our booking requests have not actually read the house rules!  We have a strictly fragrance-free house due to our medical condition, and when we reply to them asking if they read the house rules and specifying them, in 90% of the cases the people making the booking request either don't reply at all, or reply that they didn't read carefully.  So we have a very high decline rate, but all because people don't actually read the rules.   It's not fair to penalize hosts for guests not reading the house rules!  I've suggested over and over to AirBnB to please allow us to have an automatic questionnaire sent to potential guests before they can request to book i.e. "have you read the fragrance-free rules and can you abide by them" but they have not implemented this, so we repeatedly have requests by fragrance-using guests that we then have to decline.

[Linda108]

@Shar-Bacchus0  You have a very lovely home that is offered at a great value price.   You have a very narrow potential guest market you are targeting.  I wonder if there are other booking platforms that would be a better fit for you.  Air BNB is not good at excluding the general public and even though you make it very clear that fragrance is not tolerated, as you have experienced, the vast majority of guests will not realize the full implications.  That being stated, there are many other travelers that it would be a huge value add for them to find a fragrance free setting as nice as yours.  

In addition, you will not really be able to manage your requirement for fragrance free with a large group staying at the entire house.  It is difficult to ensure that no one will inadvertantly bring fragrance into your space.  

Good luck!!

[Jody79]

I've recently started hosting (less than a month now) and have had my first negative hosting experience.  Our house rules state no parties/events, however our guests last night clearly had a party.  I will be taking some of the suggestions that others have posted going forward, one being re-stating the house rules in my welcome message.  A suggestion I'd like to make to Airbnb is to maybe have a specific checklist where guests have to acknowledge each house rule prior to booking or requesting a booking.  Ie, place a check by each house rule.  I think that would help to protect the host, and at the very least it would help to ensure the guest is aware of all the house rules prior to their stay.

[Amanda820]

I'm a relatively new host. I have instant booking turned on, with the all the available safety-net requirements enabled (good reviews, government id etc.) Unfortunately, I made the dreaded newbie mistake of declining "inquiries" that come in from people who do not meet my instant book requirements, and now my "acceptance rating" has dropped to 85% which is below their 88% and "could" cause my listing to be removed. (Customer service declined to reset it for me, despite a fall-on-my-sword plea for not understanding the differences between inquiries and requests.)

My biggest frustration is not the confusing nature of the "inquiry" vs "reservation" requests, but the fact that customer service also told me that being on instant book WILL NOT positively impact my acceptance rating. That the only way to do that is to turn off instant book - or accept inquiries that come in from people who do not meet my minimum criteria. That doesn't seem fair, right?

Is that correct? Did customer service miscommunicate that? That seems completely counter-productive to their desires to push hosts to instant booking - and also seems VERY unfair, since I've actually taken the extra step to AUTO-APPROVE nearly all the reservations that are submitted through the platform for my property. Their inbox lists those reservations from instant book as "approved," so shouldn't those count positively toward my score to help me correct my error? 

Any thoughts? I submitted this as product development feedback, but I'm super frustrated about it as a new host trying to maximize the success of my listing. 

[Michelle53]

I'm bumping this for further discussion, because no matter what I do, my acceptance rate is consistently falling, apparently irrespective of my number of acceptances vs number of declines.  My response rate is 100%. No issues there. 

Per the OP : "You can respond to an inquiry with an answer, a pre-approval, or by declining. Declining an inquiry signals to the guest that their needs aren’t a good fit for your space and encourages them to request another listing. But none of these actions directly affects your acceptance rate. If you pre-approve an inquiry and the guest books your space, that counts as an acceptance. If you pre-approve and they don’t book, it doesn’t have any effect on your acceptance rate. And if you decline an inquiry, your acceptance rate is not affected."

I started the year with 87% acceptance rate. I've accepted 12 booking requests, and declined one. 

My acceptance rate is now 85%. 

I have not declined any inquiries, as I keep reading that this affects my acceptance rate. 

Is the OP incorrect ? Anyone have any insights at all into this process ?

I have a pending booking request that came in yesterday at 2.15pm.  Joined October 2019. Zero reviews, and no profile at all.    

Guest message just says "Hi! I'm visiting a friend from (I removed the location)  for the week. Very excited to be staying with you!"

I responded at 2.21pm with some basic questions -  the usual, like "have you read the house rules?".

So far, zero response back. 

I will, of course, keep trying up to "time's up", but for someone wanting to stay for a full week, why should I feel pressure to accept a reservation where, right off the bat, someone is not communicating responses to my questions ?   I should mention that I really would like to accept a full week booking. I just want to know who I am hosting, and not have to deal with complaints later that I don't have a full kitchen, for example. 

[Nischal0]

Has ‘Acceptance Rate’ been removed from dashboard as I cannot locate it anymore on the Airbnb app and website? I’m a Superhost and I’d be very happy if this ‘unfair’ metric has finally been removed. 

[Helen427]

Good comments @Nischal0  especially with all the Data Breaches and Internet outages beyond our control...

Not everyone is connected 24/7, nor does everyone Geographically have immediate access to the internet.

Recent disasters worldwide also call for a Review of the Environmental Modification Convention agreement signed in the 1970's in compliance with UN initiatives and harm to people and the environment, e.g use of Rockets increasing forced use of Satellite technology to replace tried and true Sustainable Telecommunications technology of copper and Trees for power poles and electricity above the ground that were easy to locate and repair when there were outages caused through weather events or vehicle accidents etc.

There's much interesting discussion about the use of Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning  and proposed and existing Regulations.

'Robots' have been around as machinery since over 100 years ago, and Power and Telephones were introduced and more accessible then to.

Interesting what is included in Archived Newspapers!!!