@Emilia42
Yes, with some guests, it is difficult to decide. Where there are obvious red flags, I will turn them away, and I find that I do this more often after a couple of errors where I ignored my gut feeling and then the guest turned out to be far from ideal.
However, it's often through the correspondence in the request stage that those red flags are raised. They are not always in the reviews/ratings (the guest couldn't IB with me anyway if they had negative ones) or on the guest's profile. Most guests have very little info there. I am sure there were guests who IBed with me that I would have turned away if they had been requests.
I felt like IB worked okay for me for quite a while, but in recent months, I had so many problematic bookings. In the space of one week, I had to cancel the following IBs:
- Third party booking. Got them to sort it out and book from their own account, but then it turned out there were three people when my max was two and they also expected to quarantine here, which my listing clearly stated was impossible. Also, these guests were able to IB without making any payment. This resulted in cancelling TWO IBs for the same set of guests.
- A guest with no communication skills whatsoever, who simply couldn't answer the simplest of questions, nor read the listing. It turned out his positive reviews were actually for his mum and he had somehow taken over her profile. I am guessing she changed the name and photo on the profile to his so that he would be able to IB listings without having reviews of his own.
So, I used up all three of my penalty free cancellations for the year in one week alone. The guests who ended up booking for those dates turned out to be a nightmare. They basically took over all the communal areas, made a hell of a mess in the kitchen and smoked both cigarettes and weed in the bedroom. They complained constantly that their room was cold (I'm guessing they were opening the windows because of the smoking) but wouldn't let me enter their room to see if there was anything I could do. One of them was so rude about it that I had to tell him that he was not to speak to me that way in my own house. At least it resulted in an apology, but the complaints didn't stop.
Then there is the lack of control over the calendar. It has happened a few times now that I had a lovely existing guest wanting to extend or a lovely former guest wanting to return and, while we were communicating about it, someone else IBed the dates and none of those people turned out to be great guests. Of course, it depends on the situation of the host/the listing, but I find it odd that anyone would book a long term homestay without any prior communication with the host, especially given that on my listing I ask them to send me certain information before booking.
Anyway, I had enough of it, so have turned off IB and, so far, the bookings are still coming. I haven't noticed any difference on that front.
Of course, the 24 hour window is super stressful and many guests simply do not provide the information required within that time frame. I have learnt to be strict about it and decline them, even though I know it might just be because they have their notifications turned off. On the other hand, there are guests who IB and NEVER send the information requested and then you are either stuck with this poor communicator (who will inevitably turn out to be problematic in other ways) or you have to get on the phone and try to convince some (hopefully trained and logical) CS rep to do a penalty free cancellation.
Sorry for the essay! I know IB works very well for some hosts and I'm not saying I'll never use it again, but life is already so much easier without it.
