Guest Check-in time!

[Robin4]

Can I suggest to all hosts to check you listing for your advertised 'Check-in'  time!

I have had a month away with family on the East Coast and arrived home yesterday.......the afternoon of the 10th  March.

I had blocked the first 10 nights of March on my calendar but left the night of the 11th open. Within an hour of arriving home I received an Instant booking for tonight (the 11th) but, the odd thing was, the guest wanted to check-in at 9.00am today .......morning of the 11th.

I sent a message back to the guest saying on this occasion I could grant an early check-in as there was not a guest staying the previous night and the cottage was ready, so I would  allow a 9.00am check-in, even though check-in is regularly not allowed until after the advertised 2.00pm.  

The guest sent this back to me......

My check-in time has always been ' from 2.00pm'  1400 hours so, I went onto my listing editing page and my check-in time is now shown as Flexible- 8.00am/ 10.00am or '10.00m am next day'.....which of course is entirely unrealistic!

I tried to edit my check-in time but the program would not let me. The only options I was offered was ' Flexible'  or ' 10.00am' or 10.00 am next day, that was it, no other options.

I got onto support and explained the situation and I initially thought they were not of any help, they just kept telling me to go to my editing page and manually edit my check-in time. I kept explaining, that was what I was already trying to do but the program would not accept my changes, I had to stick with flexible or 10.00am. Support said they would look into it on their end, I thanked her and an hour later decided I would send her a screenshot of what was happening through the support message, and when I went back to my editing page I was all of a sudden able to insert 2.00pm as a check-in time and save it. So it seems she was able to correct my issue.

Sorry this is soo long winded but, if this has happened to me it has probably happened to many other hosts as well, I am just fortunate that a guest came along requesting to take up my offer of an 0800 check-in which brought the issue to my attention before any damage was done.

It may be a good idea for any hosts who read this to check what time their listing page is showing and amend it if it is not correct!

Cheers..........Rob

[Sarah977]

@Robin4  Check-in times reverting to flexible has been reported before- I think it happened to Inna in Chicago as well.

Also there was a post the other day about getting a reservation with the wrong check-in time listed. Guests apparently can request a different check-in time from the one listed, but it says at the top of that form that the host has to approve it. However, there isn't anything sent to hosts re approving it. Seems we are required to check every reservation and if we notice the guest has entered a custom check-in time, we then have to message them to say it's not possible!

I wonder what exactly our new head of hosting has been doing with her time, aside from making PR videos. Because things have only gotten progressively more difficult for hosts despite all her assurances of how hard she was going to work to make things better. She shows up here with a response to a disgruntled host once in awhile, usually to a post that's already 2 months old.

[Robin4]

@Sarah977 

Sorry if I am covering old ground Sarah, being away for a while means I have missed a lot here on the CC but, if this is old news and it is still happening, that alarms me! We are the ones who have to deal with the problems these issues create and when they are not of our doing and remain unfixed....that is just unacceptable.

Sarah these little surprises keep happening all the time!

The other day while away I received a message on my phone app....

Jason's (not his real name)  booking has been cancelled  16th to 22nd April. 

That was it, no other information and no message stream to precede it!!!

My reaction was 'how can a booking I do not have be cancelled??' 

The next thing I get a message from Jason........,

Apparently it took 'Jason'  and Airbnb longer than the allocated 12 hours to get that verification sorted out and the booking simply lapsed as a 'cancelled reservation' !!

Now, as you know Sarah, a year or two ago a booking would come through to us along with an admin  message ..."This  guest has 24 hours to complete their verification, the dates will remain blocked on your calendar until the guests account has been verified" .......fine, we all knew where we stood.

Now, it's just a bloody shambles, Airbnb choose to say nothing to the host and give the guest 12 hours to verify their account before calling it a booking and in that 12 hours another booking can slide in and steal the guests required dates, which is what happened to this guest of mine. 

Can you possibly think of anything more stupid than that Sarah? I contacted CX and they have confirmed that what I have described here is now the way booking verifications are handled.

*

Sarah I have been pleased to give @Catherine-Powell time to settle into what is a taxing role with many complex issue but, we are going to need to see some results soon. Catherine has been with the company for a year now and I am concerned that these issues that so frustrate us seem to be on the rise rather than being tackled. Short term renting is not just a PR exercise, it is a difficult job, we hosts are the ones with our heads on the chopping block all the time, day after day, and we cannot simply offer our guests a few soothing words which will make us look good and have their problems disappear.

Both of the instances I have detailed here in this thread have happened to me in the past week! But, a look at my activity log to CX will show that 02 85203333 is one of the most used numbers on my mobile phone. Week after week I am trying to sort our problems that I didn't create.....Airbnb did, and the time has really come for decent cohesive action to stop this continual unheralded avalanche of platform glitches. 

Our jobs are hard enough as it is and a PR video every now and then is just not cutting the mustard!

Cheers.......Rob

[Sarah977]

@Robin4 I wasn't meaning to suggest you shouldn't have posted this because it's been brought up before- there are always new hosts popping in, so warnings are always good, I just know I've read about this problem before, although it's never happened to me. 

Hosts have been reporting that other settings have inexplicably changed, too. Like their minimum booking days, and other availibilty settings. Or days they:ve blocked showing as available, or vice versa. It's seeming like hosts need to check every setting daily to make sure nothing has been mysteriously changed. A colossal waste of time.

[Fred13]

The other day someone let us know the night before that they can't come the next day after all. WE have no clue who they were nor when they even conversed with us since they never had even paid. We just answered with a 'What-a-pity' reply and left it at that. They booked a week later for for a stay for next year. Strange days.

[Robin807]

I read on another thread that a host discovered that whenever he made any changes to his booking settings that his check-in time would switch to flexible even though he made no changes to his check-in time. This appears to be what happened to me. Last night I made a change to my house rules and after I saved that change my check-in time switched to flexible. Luckily I noticed this right away and I was able to change it back.