really bad experience and totally useless support from airbnb

[Carole849]

I logged on to Airbnb to  try to delete a  7 year old listing, with a view to updating it, and eventually relisting with updates.    It appears  by logging in  I had reactivated my account, and my listing became active immediately, with instant booking and no confirmation.    Which I may add I did NOT tick any box for, nor did I want to initiate a booking, I was trying to add a new listing as  the old one was out of date.  Within minutes I received requests, and luckily managed to message the guests to explain the error.  I then had one guest, message me to say he was coming in 1/2 hour.  I tried in vain to tell him that I was not hosting yet, but he turned up at my house.  Not only inconvenient for me and the potential guest, but very embarrassing.  I contacted admin, only to be told that if  cancelled, I would have to pay a penalty.  I have since after ages trying to navigate the web site on my iPhone discovered that the 'Immediate booking tab'  was set as a 'recommended' default.   I have tried to explain this to admin, but have met with no response yet, even asking a super host to pass on my explanation  to someone in the Admin.  I am disgusted with the absolute lack of Technical support from Airbnb when you run into difficulties like this.  I have since read the terrible TRUSTPILOT reviews about customer services, but I wish I had read them before.

[Huma0]

@Carole849 

Sorry to hear this happened to you. Yes, the IB setting is a problem.

When I started hosting in my own home, I listed one room. The suggested price looked good to me but instant booking did not, so I made sure that box was unchecked and then I went to bed...

I woke up in the morning to find that not only had the system turned IB back on, but that 'smart' pricing had slashed the rate in half and so, of course, I had lots of bookings due to the ridiculously low price. The first one was only for one night, so I honoured that, but there was one for two months also! Luckily, the guests were understanding about it when I contacted them and told them the error.

Some time later, I felt forced to use IB because Airbnb were really starting to push it and burying my listings in the search results. I went from being always fully booked to having no bookings at all, so had no choice.

More recently, I decided I was fed up of IB and would trial turning it off. I did this one by one for each of my three listings and found it didn't affect bookings anymore (I now only host long term guests, so it's less of a problem). 

However, after I turned it off, the system turned it back on for one of my rooms, so I know this can happen. Luckily, I spotted it and turned it back off before anyone booked.

I am glad I didn't have to deal with Airbnb CS about it though as that has seriously deteriorated in the past few years, especially since Airbnb laid off lots of well trained CS staff at the start of the pandemic and replaced them and subcontracted to external companies. The majority of CS reps now seem to be untrained with the minimum knowledge of Airbnb policy and sometimes also with very limited language skills. 

I am not sure what you can do about the situation now though. No, IB should not be on by default, but at least you know now for the future that it's something to keep an eye on. I keep double checking every now and then to make sure it's still off!