Hi All,
I am posting this reply to my own post in order to provide a detailed description of this problem to Airbnb support/web team:
Early today (somewhere around 10 or 11 AM PST?) I noticed that my Airbnb calendar was showing *every* date as blocked (we are listing [link removed]). This is not a change that I made. Many other hosts have discovered the same issue. I suspect that many (or even all) listings that use the "Booking window" preference to control availability may be affected.
To recitify the *immediate* issue, I manually deleted some of the erroneous blocks (or, I should say more correctly -- BLOCK -- I'm pretty sure it's a single block that was set by the Booking window preference, which is currently mis-behaving -- please read on for details).
Here are my observations about this issue, which I believe relates to the following:
* My listing uses the "Booking window" preference (Availability settings > Reservation preferences > Booking window) to limit availability. I find that, currently, changing the "Booking window" preference does not correctly block dates out into the future. Basically, it *does not* block or unblock the correct dates (it currently seems to do *nothing*). Other hosts experiencing this issue have reported slightly different (but still incorrect) behavior, such as the Booking window pref blocking an incorrect date range. (In my case, it seems to currently do nothing.)
* What affected hosts have observed however, is that sometime recently (this morning? at least that's when it seems to have happened to me) ALL of our calendar dates became blocked. Some hosts (like me) report being able to manually delete the blocks, others seem to be unable to delete the blocks and restore availability of my listing. However, I still seem to have a block from Nov 1 2017 until the end of time which is still on my calendar. I could manually delete it, but I've left it there in case that's helpful with troubleshooting.
* Downstream ICS impact: The "blocked" dates (which again, I think were coming from the "Booking window" pref, which has gone haywire) actually propagate to downstream calendars if your sync from Airbnb to an external platform. For example, I usually have my Airbnb calendar synced to export to Orbirental. When this problem started occurring this morning, my Orbirental calendar was completely blocked, because it was filled up by these erroneous blocked dates from Airbnb. (I mention this because I *think* -- I'm not sure -- that blocked dates that come from "Booking window" settings *did not* propogate downstream in the past.) I had to manually delete those blocked dates on my Orbirental calendar. In the case of my external platform (Orbirental), resyncing my Airbnb calendar to Orbirental did not seem to remove the blocks. (The source of that issue may or may not be Airbnb's fault, but I'm providing detail here.)
* Upstream ICS impact: This issue does not seem to affect (or be caused by) inbound synced calendars. In my listing's case, I sync an external calendar source (my master calendar) *to* Airbnb. All imported/synced reservations continued to show up properly. Resyncing the incoming calendar *did not* remove the blocked dates (which, again, I'm pretty sure are coming from / related to the "Booking window" prefs).
* I reported this issue via phone to a rep who may or may not have understood it well. However, she did say that she would relay the issue to the technical team.
* The issue is not easily "screen shottable" and is not "reproducible", per se, except that in affected accounts (like mine), the "Booking window" preference does not seem to have any affect on available dates (or it blocks/unblocks the *wrong* dates as reported by some hosts). But what *has* happened is that affected listings are currently unbookable/unavailable due to the presence of a block that affects all calendar dates.
Hope this helps to resolve this issue!
Best regards,
Keith
[link removed]