Instant Book Filter

[Nadia135]

After years as a Superhost and a fully booked 5 star Airbnb Plus property  I learned Airbnb no longer shows my property if the Instant Book filter is on. Multiple inquiries later they’ve told me the following:

“You will need to be active and responsive to your Guest and minimize declined request in order for your account to be refresh and that instant booking option will just go back after.”

Facts: I have used IB from the beginning. have never declined a request. I respond to inquiries immediately. For 2021 my listing was essentially fully booked and I only offer 30 day plus stays. I received 3 requests using the booking request for non stays: 1 asking me if I needed a cleaner, 2 if I could share my hosting experience and 3 for a stay outside my minimum requirements. My guess is that Airbnb’s algorithm flagged me for these 3 non-bookings. I pre-approved all of them for fear of being dinged for unresponsiveness or non approvals. Should I have responded with a no instead of pre-approval?

My 5 star reviews reflect my prompt response.  I also wonder if the fact I only accept long term rentals (31 days and beyond) is causing the algorithm to flag me as not responsive given I don’t have many requests/bookings?

Calls to airbnb support have been ineffectual. I get told someone else needs to look at this and resolve it and yet nothing is being done. Thoughts on how to clear my account from this overreaching algorithm? 
Thank you in advance for your thoughts and advice. 

[Sarah977]

@Nadia135  You are mixing up terms, so it's a bit difficult to advise you. 

Inquiries have the choices Preapprove or Decline. But you don't need to do either for an Inquiry- all you need  to do is message the inquirer back within 24 hrs. Never waste a decline on an inquiry and never pre-approve a booking you don't want.

The choices for Requests are Accept and Decline. You must do one or the other within 24 hours. You can also ask to the guest to withdraw the request if it is inappropriate for your listing, and if they do that before the 24 hrs. runs out, you won't need to decline.

You must have declined several requests or inquiries to have received that message, it has nothing to do with your average length of stays.

[Nadia135]

Thank you so much Sarah for taking the time to answer this post. These 3 definitely came through as inquiries and I thought I would be penalized for declining them so I preapproved all three even though they weren’t technically inquiries.

Thank you so much for clarifying the difference between the two terms. Good to know going forward.

Unfortunately this does not demystify my particular situation since I have issued no declines.

[Sarah977]

@Nadia135   Then it either sounds like a glitch, or maybe they are considering you not bothering to message an inquiry back, just pre-approving, to be  a lack of response. Even if an inquiry is a scammer or inappropriate, you should still message back, even if all you say is "Not interested." Then, if it's what you believe is a scammer, click on the flag symbol next to the message stream to report them.

I know you've spent a bunch of time on this already, and CS is basically useless, but you should insist on them explaining why this has happened, since you have always responded to every inquiry or request on time and never declined an inquiry or a request.

[Nadia135]

Sarah, wanted to give you an update I received yesterday from the Airbnb customer service rep who was most helpful and tried his best. He was clearly chagrined at the following response that he received from his technical team. He said he was unable to send me their response in writing but he read it to me. In a nutshell they said they red flag accounts they consider high risk in the instant book feature is toggled off by Airbnb. It will be resumed once the host has more bookings. They do not reveal why the account has been flagged. One can surmise of course that accounts are flagged for declining too many reservations or poor response time. He read with me that I have neither. When I asked him if he could provide me clarity on what made my case high-risk he said the technical team would not divulge that information to him and in fact reprimanded him for giving me the impression that I would have an answer. He was an excellent customer service rep and clearly extremely frustrated at his inability to help as he too was completely mystified as to why my instant book has been toggled off.

This kind of behavior seems extremely suspicious by Airbnb. It makes me wonder if behind the scenes they are  promoting hosts who have shorter stays to increase service fees. Since I only host 31 days day stays,  I believe their overall service fee or an account such as mine might be lower. I can’t think of any other reason they would want to demote a listing such as mine that is not only an Airbnb plus but a super host and a five star review.

i’m wondering how to canvas other Airbnb hosts who are seeing the same thing happened to them. I did a quick search in my neighborhood and noticed one filtering for instant book versus not instant book a dramatic decrease in listings which leads me to believe this is happening to others. How do we promote this post or issue to gather more information across Airbnb hosts?

[Emilia42]

@Nadia135 When Airbnb started disabling instant book for particular hosts we heard a lot of chatter about it here on this forum. But I have not seen many posts about it for awhile now.

Here are some old posts. Maybe you would want to connect with some of these hosts?

https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Help/Instant-Book-feature-technical-glitch/m-p/870645

https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Hosting/Instant-Book-not-working/m-p/987323

https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Hosting/Does-AirBnB-Care-Instant-Booking-not-working/m-p/908513

https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Hosting/airbnb-customer-service-quot-help-quot-instant-book-knot...

[Nadia135]

Emilia thank you so much. Will look through and connect with them to see if they were able to resolve. I’m surprised not to see more of these issues currently but perhaps I’m the anomaly!:)

[Jim-and-Barbara2]

I have had this exact problem for over two years. They say they will fix it but the do not. It is making us lose bookings. Its pathetic!