Hi there
I am wondering if anyone knows if it’s possible to accept a three month booking and charge the first month at a higher rate and the 2nd and 3rd months at a nominal rate (e.g £8000 in June and £50 in July and £50 in August) to avoid someone cancelling during their stay and me not getting the full amount of the booking because of Airbnb’s current 30 days cancellation policy?
What I don’t know is that because Airbnb currently drip feed the payments to me monthly, is if under the above scenario they would divide the cost of the whole booking by three and pay me three equal payments (no good to me) or whether they would make the first month’s payment £8000 (what I want) and then the 2nd and 3rd payments £50 each.
The reason I want to do this, is my husband and I are travelling the world on our Airbnb rent money. We had a dire situation last year when we accepted a four-month booking and we booked a four- month trip to India on the back of it. The guests cancelled after six weeks and we were left seriously out of pocket and were unable to do what we had planned as we simply didn’t have the money.
We are also on another platform where we get the whole amount up front. This enables us to plan in the confidence that we have the money for each trip. Almost all our guests are families who’ve sold their house and are in between house moves, who don’t want to sign up to a year’s tenancy agreement, so they always have the money – that’s not the problem, it’s finding somewhere! We have a constant stream of enquiries from desperate people as there is virtually no competition where I live.
We always take customers from the other platform because of their up 100% up-front payment policy, but their fees are much higher than Airbnb so we would rather accept more customers from here, but I am not prepared to until we can find a way of securing 100% up front payment.
Any experience, knowledge or advice? It would be most welcome!
Helen
