What to do for nobody books our rooms from booking.com during the time we give the guest from airbnb to decide about his booking??

[Alexey77]

The guest made a preliminary booking on airbnb, but when I closed this room for him on booking.com the room became unavailable on airbnb too(.   So what to do now?

Many thanks for any quick advice

[Colleen253]

@Alexey77 Your Booking and Airbnb calendars are synched.

When someone actually requests a booking on Airbnb, the date is automatically blocked. If you needed to block it yourself, then the guest only made an “Inquiry”. Open the date back up and the potential guest, or anyone else for that matter, can make an actual booking when they are serious.

It’s not good practice to block dates for anyone while they “decide” what they want to do. They may decide against booking with you, and in the meantime you miss out on other bookings. 

[Alexey77]

Hi Colleen253! The situation is more tricky: I had to block dates on another channel, booking.com to avoid double booking if the guest from airbnb decides to book. I could have to pay a penalty in this situation

[Gavin-and-Jo0]

@Alexey77 We sometimes have a similar problem for a different reason in that bookings from AirBnB take a while to come through to our channel manager so there is a risk of a double booking (we get most of our bookings from Booking.com).  When I get notification of a booking from AirBnB I go to our channel manager and increase the price for those dates to something high like $1000/night. Our AirBnB prices don't feed from the channel manager but our Booking.com ones do so this pretty much ensures a reservation won't come from Booking.com in the time it takes for the calendars to sync and it only takes me a couple of minutes to do so its no big deal.

We don't usually block dates for AirBnB enquiries but might do if its a particularly good booking for us so I would just do the same in that case.  If the booking doesn't work out I just have to remember to go back and change the pricing back to normal. If it's easy enough to change your pricing on Booking.com you might be able to buy yourself some time doing this.

Jo

[Alexey77]

Hey, Jo, thank you! That’s just what I did yesterday finally after a long thinking.It seems there’s no other way