Cancellations

[Joanna225]

Please excuse if this appears twice, as Airbnb gave me an error message.  

I changed my cancelation policy to "flexible" under recommendation from Airbnb, and now I'm experiencing so many cancellations, I hate hearing my phone ding.  It seems like guests are reserving my place, having it tied up for weeks, and then cancelling whenever.  And of course with the flexible policy there are no consequences, but I'm not necessarily able to rebook. I used to have strict or moderate, and didn't have this problem.  What are other hosts experiences? 

[Sarah977]

@Joanna225  My suggestion is to stop acting on Airbnb's "recommendations". Those aren't for your benefit, they are for Airbnb's benefit. As long as they can collect their service fees, and hold onto the guest's money while it collects interest in their bank account, that's all they actually care about. They don't care about the viability of your own hosting business. Do what works for you, not what is "recommended."

A flexible policy seems like a really bad idea for most hosts, unless they have a listing which generally gets a lot of last minute bookings, so that if someone cancelled day-before, they'd likely fill the space again. Or hosts who are just doing Airbnb quite casually, and don't really care if the space gets cancelled last-minute.