Guests send booking requests without reading the house rules

[Pedro1613]

Hi Fellow Hosts

I'm constantly having to deal with booking requests from guests who have not read the house rules. Some of them don't even know about house rules, and I need to send the rules in a message.

Problem: after spending time educating these guests, they either retract their request or they disappear and leave me with a booking request to decline. I'm having this issue everyday! I waste a lot of time asking people to confirm if they have read the information in my listing and the house rules even though I make reference to the house rules at several locations in the listing.

Sometimes, guests send a booking request with a question about the listing, so they are still seeking clarification and not ready to book. They should be sending an enquiry instead.  

Any ideas or suggestions that would prevent people from sending booking requests without reading the rules.

I also think the enquiry / request features can be quite confusing for guests/hosts. It me some time to understand the difference and how to deal with them properly.

Thanks

Pedro

[Huma0]

---

@Pedro1613 wrote:

Problem: after spending time educating these guests, they either retract their request

---

I think it's better that the guest retracts if they do not like the house rules. It means you have dodged a bullet. Those guests, if they did keep the booking are likely to break the rules and/or complain in the reviews.

As for guests who are still asking questions, that is pretty normal. They might be confused about the difference between an enquiry and a request (the system is set up so that the request to book is much more prominent than 'contact host') but often it's because they are fairly sure they want the listing and don't want to risk losing out. You can usually tell by the type of questions they ask.

With requests, I often remind the guest that Airbnb sets a time limit, so please could they respond to my questions by X time. It often helps. 

Or, if the listing is clearly not suitable for the guest, I will first ask them to withdraw the request before I need to decline it. Again, this works a lot of the time.

But yes, it is a problem and it's very time consuming and there are guests who just don't respond within the 24 hours and you have to take a hit to your acceptance rate, but that's better than accepting guests you are not sure of. I've made this mistake in the past and it's come back to bite me.