Cancel overlapping booking.

[Abrasha-and-Maria0]

I am new to hosting.

Assume I have a guest who booked 3 days at some point in the future, say in January. I have accepted the booking.

Another potential guest wants to book for a week or 10 days, but can't because the requested/needed days include the 3 days that have already been booked by the previous guest. (Obviously those 3 days show as not available on my calendar.) The guest who wants to stay longer messaged me about this within the AirBnB system and asked if he could stay those days. I would have to cancel the reservation of the first guest to accommodate the longer stay guest.

What are the penalties, if any, if I cancel the 3 day guest to be able to book the longer stay guest. Is this allowable?

I am asking this, because this situation actually happened with my very first guest. At this time I did not have "booking without requesting approval" checked yet. A guest wanted to book for 2 days, and less than a minute later a guest, who I was already in communication with, wanted to book for a week. I canceled the first request without any penalties. I assume the AirBnB system could see all the communications happening, because they all took place within the system.

[Emiel1]

Hi,

Your "cancel"of the fist guest is probably not a cancel, but only a decline ?

Otherwise you would have been penilazed (at least with an automatic message about this in your reviews, which is not there yet) and even more, please read:

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/990/i-m-a-host--what-penalties-apply-if-i-need-to-cancel-a-reser...

Best regards,

Emiel

[Abrasha-and-Maria0]

Thank you Emiel,

The link you provided very clearly states everything I need to know about this.

[Kelly149]

@Abrasha-and-Maria0 If both of those bookings are from abb then even if you cancel the first, you will not be able to host the second bc one of the consequences of cancelling a reservation is that those days are permanently unavailable. This is done to specifically prevent what you are proposing. ABB does not allow you to accept a better offer & leave them with an unhappy guest who is annoyed about having to start over. 

Now if that second guest was from a different booking platform then maybe you don’t care. But there are still other consequences for cancelling. A fairly decent mantra for an abb host is “don’t ever ever cancel”

[Abrasha-and-Maria0]

FYI, I was not "proposing" this. I asked the quesion because I thought something similar had happened around my very first booking. It turned out that it had not. I misunderstood the sifferenc between an actual booking and a request for booking. 

[Linda108]

@Abrasha-and-Maria0  You have gotten good feedback from both @Kelly149 and @Emiel1.  Perhaps you have never been a guest on Air BNB but it is somewhat anxiety producing for the guest thinking that a host could ruin travel plans in order to get a better paying guest.  It happens especially if the host uses other platforms.  I hope you will consider the impact on the guest.  

[Abrasha-and-Maria0]

To all who responded, thank you very much. To clarify, this is not something I am planning to do.

I asked the question, because I thought what had happened in my example was an acual booking. It wasn't. I called the AirBnB number for help in resolving that issue. It was my very first booking.  I also misunderstood the difference between booking and declining a request for booking.