Cancellation for a better booking

[Shirley508]

Looking for advise on this situation. We had a guest inquiring about 3 days stay at our place. Right at the same moment we had another guest asking for a week. Unfortunately the guest for 3 days accepted our offer and booked and we missed out on the weekly booking by a couple of minutes. Would it be ok to decline the first reservation and take the weekly reservation? Would this damage our metrics in any way? 

[Ricardo85]

@Shirley508 

Once the host cancel the reservation, the calendar is blocked.

Ricardo

[Sarah977]

@Shirley508  You are using a bunch of terms and confusing them and also it is confusing to decipher.

Do you understand the difference between inquiries and requests? An inquiry is a way of a guest asking questions without committing to a booking. You can simply answer an inquiry, or you can pre-approve it, in which case the guest can go on to book, or not. 

A request must either be accepted or declined within 24 hrs, unless the guest witthdraws it before that. When you accept a request, Airbnb immediately charges the guest and it becomes a confirmed booking (sometimes this takes up to 24 hrs if Airbnb needs to verify the guest's info)

If you pre-approve an inquiry, but a request comes in before the inquirer has actually booked, you can accept the request and that takes precendent over the pre-approved inquiry. Or you could pre-approve another inquiry. The bottom line is, first to pay gets the booking dates.

You can't "decline" a confirmed booking. Declining is only possible for inquiries and requests which are not yet booked.

No, you can't cancel a confirmed reservation just because you get a better offer. The penalties for cancelling are harsh. Not to mention how rude that would be to the booked guests.

[Anonymous]

@Shirley508 if the booking is already confirmed, it's too late to "decline" it. You'd have to cancel, and one of the several penalties would be getting blocked from rebooking those dates. It's about the worst thing you could do to your metrics.

Once when a similar thing happened to me before, the first booked guest wound up canceling a few hours later, and I was able to notify the second one in time for her to re-send the request and get confirmed. Another time, the guest who missed their first chance to an overlapping booking wound up requesting again the following year. So even if you have to disappoint the weekly guest this time, keep that fire burning while you have their attention, and who knows, maybe it brings you some luck later. 

Those short bookings are great for building up your reviews, but if you prefer longer stays, you can always adjust your Minimum Stay setting.