What is this "pet friendly" air bnb listings?

[Karen2913]

My unit is listed as no pets.  A guest made a reservation yesterday to move in today. She then messaged asking about pet friendly pubs, and mentioned that she was bringing her dogs.  This morning when I saw the message, I asked her to cancel, which she did - but said she booked, because she found us on "pet friendly bnb"  What is that?  How do I get off of this listing?  Or is she telling a lie to cover her mistake, or just hoping we wouldn't mind?  I phoned airbnb and asked them to  give her a full refund - is that likely to happen?

[Emiel1]

@Karen2913 

Your listings says : "no pets"

Guest can filter on "pets allowed" when searching. If they do so, your listing will not show up.

So the guest made a mistake. They need to contact Airbnb for full refund.

[Colleen253]

@Karen2913 You are not at fault. You listing is 'no pets' so the guest made a mistake, and didn't read your listing. They will need to contact Airbnb about receiving a refund. You can authorize your share back, but the guest may not get the service fee back from Airbnb. As to the website you menton, you'd have to ask this person. Sometimes, when guests are searching a lot of different listings, they get confused. Maybe that happened here. As a new host, you should consider turning off instant book until you get some hosting experience. And in the case of this booking, if it had come through as a request to book instead, then you would have been able to point out the mistake and ask the guest to withdraw their request. 

[Anonymous]

@Karen2913   I don't know if this is related to what's happened to you, but I'll tell you my experience as a prospective guest.

You know, on the Splash page there's now a menu you can click on to activate a specialized Search, and one of the buttons is "Pet Friendly." It's represented by a picture of a dog laying on a bed, which @Sarah977 has pointed out is a really problematic way to show how hosts are expected to welcome pets. 

I've been looking for a nice place to take my dog for the weekend, so I've clicked this tab despite its problematic elements. You know what happens? I get a page full of listings that are either

a) inactive and have no calendar dates in 2021 available, or

b) available but don't have "pets allowed" ticked off as an amenity

So while guest inattentiveness might be an influencing factor here, unfortunately Airbnb is deeply complicit in making it really hard for guests to process important information about the listings they're viewing. They just want to make the sale and take the money - you have to be super vigilant about making sure the booking fits, even if it means hitting Decline a few times and accepting the nastygrams the algorithm spews at you for that/

[Laura2592]

@Anonymous same experience here when searching for a place we can take the pup for a weekend away. I always search for pets allowed but the algorithm shows me a bunch of listings that say NO PETS. I messaged a host that seemed ambiguous and got an earful about how she would never in a million years host pets. So the search is to blame for this misunderstanding. ABB REALLY wants hosts to take pets no matter what. 

@Karen2913 as others have said, contact the guest and ask her to withdraw her reservation. You don't have to host these dogs if you don't want. 

[Alexandra316]

@Karen2913 something else that happens when you filter for pet friendly: the guest will get recommendations for "similar listings" from Airbnb, but they don't apply any of the filters the guest has selected to the results. So they may have clicked on a pet friendly property then seen yours at the bottom and clicked through. Airbnb is just really terrible with dealing with pets and animals in general: it's entirely possible your guest made an honest mistake.

[Michelle53]

@Alexandra316  That's supposed to be one of the new, exciting features of the new flexible search capability, right ?  You get your filtered results first, and then it starts showing you listings with some of the filters omitted.  "You might also like these...."  or whatever the language is.   Which is a bit unfortunate in the case of "Pet friendly". 

[Alexandra316]

@Michelle53 I think this one has been around for  a while, because it's bitten me before: I thought oh, that place looks great, got all excited about it... and then when I was reviewing the rules during the booking process, found out that they didn't allow pets. I could be wrong, but I was sure I'd discovered it at least a year ago. 

[Ann72]

@Karen2913  In addition to everyone else's good points, there is a website called bringfido.com that pulls pet-friendly Airbnbs.  Yours shouldn't be listed there, but maybe give it a look.  The other possibility is a combination of all these things - the guest consulted Airbnb and got listings like the ones @Anonymous mentioned but had also consulted bringfido and just got confused and mashed everything up.

[Laura2592]

@Ann72 I will check that out! Never heard of it. 

[Nash-Cottages-LLC0]

@Karen2913 Thank you for posting your question as well as your potential guests' response. Thank you, @Ann72, for noting that website. We had a potential guest not that long ago send us a lovely initial message who was so excited to stay at our place, was so glad to have found a pet-friendly spot, and asked how we handle the pet deposit.

Huh? I immediately went to our profile, thinking that somehow the pet policy had been changed because we've never allowed pets. Of course, that setting hadn't changed. We assumed (uh oh!) that she had misread our description. The situation you described @Ann72 sheds a bit of light on that interaction. 

We wrote back to her and thanked her for her interest, for checking in with us ahead of time, and told her it caused us to scramble to our profile as we've never allowed pets at our place. Therefore, we weren't the right place for her and suggested she try a few other spots that would better align with her needs. Unsurprisingly, we never heard from her again.