I need to cancel as a host - smart price not working

[Tina8336]

I joined airbnb as a host and set a base price of $800/night for smart pricing for my house that sleeps 10. Somehome, on the busiest weekend around here, when the price should have gone north of $800, someone was able to rent my house for $400/night on instant book! I have asked them to cancel the reservation but so far have not done so. There is no way I can rent my house out during this time for $400/night - just not worth it! I should be over $1,000/night for this particular weekend. I am very new to this and have not figured out how to cancel the reservation. Can someone help? I tried calling AirBnB and thier phone system did not register any of my responses so that was very unhelpful. 

Thank you in advance!

Tina

[Deb216]

I sent you a private message.

[Emiel1]

@Tina8336 

Your listing show different prices on weekdays with a minimum of $600,- a night. In weekends the price is $750,- a night. So It seems to me Smart Pricing is not active (as weekend pricing is set), but you probably have manually set the different prices for weekdays in the calender. You also offer a 15% weekly discount.

I did not encounter $400,- a night, but offcourse i can not see pricing  of already booked dates.

If you feel it is glitch, you can contact Airbnb and ask them to cancel the reservation penalty-free

If you cancel yourself, then penalties apply.

Your listing offers free cancellation (full refund) for guests in first 48 hours after booking, but guest are  not obliged to cancel because your pricing is wrong.

[Tina8336]

Thank you Emiel. I have since gone in and made manual changes to the pricing and removed the smart pricing. I've tried calling the help line and can't get through to an actual human! Any tips for that?

[Gillian166]

smart pricing isn't great if you have a special or unique property. It will compare your listing to almost anything else, and seems to always lower the price. 

[Stephanie1933]

@Tina8336 make sure you have your smart pricing minimum price at the lowest you would accept per night. For example: we won't accept anything lower than $289 so that is my base price. Airbnb adjust the price higher on my calendar depending on demand.

What you can do is a) cancel the booking (that will not look favourably on you but needs must), b) wait for them to cancel or c) keep trying Airbnb. I can't imagine the guests will cancel just to pay more... good luck. 

[Tina8336]

I removed all the smart pricing and was able to get through to Air BnB. Since I'm a newbie, they waived the penalty this one time. Thanks for all the help everyone!

[Stephanie1933]

@Tina8336 what did the guest say in response to your cancellation? 

We had someone get an absolute bargain over Christmas last year. They booked straight away without me having time to get our pricing right. I was too scared about getting a black mark against my name so left the booking. The guest turned out to be horrible, left the only 4 star I have received. She is a superhost but still gave me a poor review even though it was total rubbish! I was devastated! Wish I had of contacted Airbnb like you did. Lesson learnt. 

All the best. Happy to answer any questions - feel free to pm me.

[Janice504]

I had a minimum price of  $115 set on smart pricing, work fine for a year. Then something when wrong  the it was showing $86 per night.

[Elisabeth40]

I know why, because at one point Airbnb launched a new option how you can adjust pricing for each day. Let’s say you had marked 3 month set for a particular pricing and the rest of the year was set to another pricing and you forgot to check it because you got used to the feature. Once you reach the date where you didn’t went in manually and changed the old pricing. This happens. I had this couple times too. It’s because you have to check each day if the pricing is not below your min set for smart pricing. Also it happened to me because I am using the app only and not the desktop version. 

[Kelly149]

It’s also worth noting that SP is not always wise to the price increases that you think it should be

[Stephanie1933]

@Kelly149  yes that is right. Our lowest SP price is about $100 over their suggestion. The algorithm can be incorrect. Found that out the hard way. Live and learn. 

[Kelly149]

@Stephanie1933  I’m not even talking about the threshold but rather the idea that “this is the big event so price will be elevated” it just doesn’t regularly work that way in my experience 

[Ann72]

@Stephanie1933 @Kelly149  I’ve concluded they do know the high-demand dates, they’re just so desperate for the highest body count possible they keep rates low for those dates with a high search count!  I keep Smart Pricing on at all times but raise the rates manually for peak dates.  

On top of that, I’ve gotten so sick of guests trying to squeeze into part of a popular weekend by taking dates with lower prices and thus effectively shutting down the whole weekend for others, I expand holiday pricing to 10 days before and after the holiday.  

If guests weren’t so skeevy about money we would be less hard-nosed about the whole thing!  Or so I think 🤔 😂🤔😂

[Elisabeth40]

@Tina8336 @I used instabook for maybe 3 years, as it first launched, it was amazing and even great time saver. But I was never able to get to the super host status, the. I realized why, because people who book through Instabook, mostly don’t read your listing description and you won’t get great reviews just because the guest is always having expectations and imagination but doesn’t actually does the work to read, I got always so much unhappy guests after couple years of using instabook I couldn’t even read any of my reviews anymore and was even traumatized when I got a notification from Airbnb that I got a review from a guest. The other downfall with instabook was: after couple years Airbnb started I am just guessing now, some algorithm which constantly pitched my listings against other listings price. I would need to compete hard in price dumping to be able to hold up the views and booking amount I need to cover my rental costs. After three years I was exhausted and understood that Airbnb has not created a helping tool to save my time, they created a tool to dump my value. It’s funny that it doesn’t matters how low I went, Airbnb always piped up a notice that I need to lower my pricing in order to be attractive to the guest for my area :))) and my pricing was below the actual rental price, they still asked to go lower! By the end I felt absolutely devalued and bad and constantly gassing even to cover the actual rental costs and satisfy guests and I still was not good enough. Absolutely big NO to smart pricing and instabook tools. Those tools are designed to dump you and throw under the bus, you will get just worse and worse and desperate and you won’t never rise. just NO