Request that Airbnb have an alternative to "request expired" and calendar blocking

[Nash-Cottages-LLC0]

Would love to get your thoughts on a suggestion to Airbnb.

A potential guest requested to book our place in January. They had no reviews and were new to the platform. Here's what they sent to us in an initial message: 

We are driving and hope to arrive mid day (plan to check in at 4pm - unless earlier check in is available). Thank you.

Given they had no reviews, we sent them a message thanking them for our interest, requesting that they read the house rules (given they are new to Airbnb) and acknowledge such in a message back to us, and then we can move forward with accepting their reservation. 

We never heard from them.

In the meantime, Airbnb sent us reminders that their reservation request expires in 17 hours, 11 hours, etc.  When we didn't accept or decline the reservation, Airbnb blocked the calendar for their requested dates. While we understand they have this system in place to encourage hosts to accept or decline, there is a third option Airbnb could take before automatically blocking the calendar: communicate. 

We communicated to them very promptly but never heard from them especially acknowledging our house rules (e.g. no smoking, no pets) so we never accepted the reservation. Of course, we didn't decline because that would, as we understand, negatively impact our host status. So, we let the request lapse. Then, our calendar was blocked. As the guest didn't meet our criteria and never communicated to us, despite us reaching out to them, we don't think Airbnb should block our calendar. 

It would be a huge improvement to us if Airbnb had an option for us to communicate with the guest (especially because they did not meet our booking criteria) before auto-blocking our calendar.

Curious how do feel about this idea as an option? 

[Ann72]

@Nash-Cottages-LLC0  I feel you because something related happened last night.  A guest inquired about bringing his dog on certain dates in January.  I told him no, unfortunately, policy was strict.  (He had stayed at my other place with his dog a couple of years ago, so I forgave him for asking :))  A few minutes later another person requested to book the same dates.  Before noticing it was a request, not an inquiry, I wrote to the first guest and gave him a heads up that someone was interested in his dates, so if he was going to travel without his dog, he might want to nail things down.  But, of course, since the second guest had put through a request, the calendar was blocked, so if the first guest had wanted the dates, he wouldn't have been able to book them anyway.  As it turned out, Guest 1 didn't need the dates and I accepted Guest 2's request.  

While I understand the calendar block is a way of preventing hosts from raising rates under the guest's nose, or from getting a better offer from someone else, in your case and in my case I would have liked some more flexibility.  

[Nash-Cottages-LLC0]

@Ann72 Thanks for sharing your story. It was quite interesting, and we've been in a similar situation in the past. 

[Melodie-And-John0]

Hi @Ann72 

"While I understand the calendar block is a way of preventing hosts from raising rates under the guest's nose, or from getting a better offer from someone else", 

Im not sure about you but I charge more for certain dates like graduations, 4th of July, Bouckville Antique week, concerts and other anticipated events we know that the places go higher and faster than other dates like the dead of winter, I disclose that in our listings.   Occasionally, I forget to  up one and get reminded by a customer inquiry, if they didn't grab it then, they snoozed! 

 Neither of those situations your saying Airbnb is trying to prevent are nefarious by themselves or even together according to the situation.   The deal isn't the deal until its inked and paid for, customers that don't accept the booking as listed (assuming they are fully qualified to do so) should expect to compete with others that might want the space more that accept the going rate, (and yes Airbnb is not the only one that has their finger on our rate buttons, they change without notice).   This is not an unfair business practice, its market pricing. 

Whats unfair is Airbnb blocking my calendar "Pending" for any reason that includes the potential guest is not fully qualified yet to conduct business with Bearpath Lodging, they should come back when they can and hope the terms are the same and its still available.   Thats just one of my little peeves with the mothership but luckily is rare! Stay well, JR

[Michelle53]

@Nash-Cottages-LLC0  I just had a situation like this. The guest sent a request to book at around 6pm, with a one liner - something like coming to visit friends and sightsee.  This guest had one good review, for the guest plus another person. 

I have some Covid-related questions, and also like to confirm the number of guests travelling, since I've had the experience of folks booking for one, but arriving with more, and I have a per-guest fee. 

I sent the response with my questions about an hour after the request. I followed up several times, and the guest never responded. With a half-hour left on the clock, I declined, with the reason that the guest had not responded to my pre-confirmation questions. 

Airbnb's rationale for not providing contact info for guests before confirming is in case, heaven forbid, someone should try to contract off-platform. 

In situations like this before Covid, and the new support structure, I could rely on calling Airbnb to have them try and reach the guest, and have them check messages. 

That doesn't work any more, since the response times are too long.   I feel like there should be a way to have new guests turn notification on, by default, to make sure they are receiving messages, or an educational pop-up which says they should look out for host messages in a situation where there is request to book. 

Declining will affect your acceptance rate, and sometimes you will get chiding messages from Airbnb, but it otherwise doesn't affect your host status. 

[Nash-Cottages-LLC0]

@Michelle53 Thank you for taking the time to share your story. And, thanks for your insights. 

[Emilia42]

@Nash-Cottages-LLC0 

This is one of the reasons why I hate getting requests (as opposed to instant booking.) It is very rare for a guest to respond even in 24 hours. At least when the instant booking comes through there is no battling a ticking clock and you have the guest's telephone number. 

I don't know if Airbnb will ever change the whole blocking the calendar thing. It's a loose loose for hosts since your best bet is to decline.

[Nash-Cottages-LLC0]

@Emilia42 Thanks for taking the time to write. The way we have it set up now works for us: Instant Book for those who meet our criteria and approving all others. This guest who we wrote about was in the latter category. Based on the number of challenges other hosts, not us,  have seen we've thought about going stricter policy of approving everyone but have not yet gone that route for the reasons you pointed out - having to approve everyone. But, I really do see the advantage of a process like that because you get a sense if you want that person(s) in your place. 

[Emilia42]

@Nash-Cottages-LLC0 Since you have instant booking enabled, you may want to add a pre-booking message (select this under your instant booking settings) to ask the guests to acknowledge your house rules and to include a message about why they are visiting, etc. 

This will hopefully prompt guests to include more information and start a conversation that you can accept right away. 

This is what guest's see when they send you a message as part of the booking process:

[Kelly149]

I sure have a long list of things I wish ABB did differently, this one in particular is fairly low down on that list. Given current parameters host choices are: decline immediately in order to keep the days unblocked and tell the guest it's nothing personal but certain things must be discussed before booking will be accepted and then go thru the write/discuss stage after the decline OR try to write back/discuss and wait to see how things seem before the 24 hour clock runs out.

The one thing in this instance that is the worst possible choice (for your host stats and for your calendar) is to answer but then do nothing with the accept/decline.

[Nash-Cottages-LLC0]

@Kelly149 Thanks for sharing your perspective Kelly; really appreciate it 

[Nash-Cottages-LLC0]

@Emilia42 Excellent idea; thank you. 

[S14]

@Nash-Cottages-LLC0  - Thank you for inviting me to join this conversation. My stories are identical to yours.

IMO -- The desired resolution is for Airbnb to change its policy of threatening to penalize our listings and/or our Superhost status and/or blocking our dates (yikes!) and/or lowering our ranking in searches when we are merely doing a good job of preventing problems by carefully screening bookings.

I feel strongly: >>>>Hosts should not be penalized in any way no matter how many requests we have to deny. This is home sharing, so we have a right to screen guests requesting to come into our homes. That should never adversely affect Hosts in any way. <<<<

And we should not get robotic threatening messages from Airbnb under any circumstances. If someone at Airbnb has a question about what we're doing, all they have to do is READ the message thread associated with any questioned transactions and they would then KNOW the answers. If they still have specific questions, they should politely ASK. (And yes, if they discover that any hosts are denying reservations due to discrimination, they should do something about that. Most denied reservations are based on something other than that. But Airbnb is assuming the worst without doing even the most basic investigation.) Such an approach would take less time than floundering circular pointless discussions with support people who are uninformed and unable to help.

I feel this policy, like more and more, on the part of Airbnb, is wrong. If I can ever figure out a different way to make a living, I would withdraw my good listings (for which I put in significant financial and human resources) and leave this.

I am doing my best and instead of being encouraged I am asked to play along with rules which make no sense and which ultimately are unmanageable. I'm grateful for this forum so we can commisserate but it's kind of unconscionable that Airbnb doesn't review the forum postings and actually consider what we're saying.

Things are bad enough during the pandemic without having to deal with an un-budgeable bureaucracy which is utterly unable to respond to reason. Not to mention support people who cannot comprehend simple language and who have no authority to do anything anyway. Useless.

Very disappointed.

[Cave0]

You forget S14, Airbnb's interest is in maximising its revenue and this is achieved by ensuring the maximum number of accepted booking requests and completed stays.  Airbnb measures nothing else at the end of the day, shareholder value is what is is all about as it moves towards going public.  VRBO is no different now that it's part of Expedia, all of these organisations are moving away from the original concept and are trying ever more to compete with Booking.Com and each other - at your expense when it comes to you exercising a choice over who stays in our house.  

It's a concern for all hosts who rent out their own homes and a fundamental shift in direction by Airbnb and VRBO, driven by profit, hopefully there'll be a new contender at some stage to cater for the segment of the market in which we operate.