Instant Booking

[Lois56]

How do hosts set notice required for Instant Bookings?  We are new to hosting and had an uncomfortable situation arise this week.  We have 2 listings and had reservations for both (1 from Thurs to Monday and 2nd from Sat to Monday).  On Friday afternoon my co-host arrived home to find an unexpected new  guest sitting on our front door step.  He had booked our 2nd room for Friday night  less than an hour before.  He stayed until our check out time of noon making it very tight for us to re-prepare the room for the arrival of the guests reserved from Sat to Mon.

I went looking how we can set a reasonable  notice time.  We would prefer at least 6 hours preferably longer butdon't see how to set booking before arriving time frame.  Help?

Lois 

[Steve143]

Hello @Lois56,

There isn't such a setting. If you allow same day checkin all you can set is what Airbnb calls the "Advance notice" time. But that's just the time up until which your listing shows in searches done on that day. I have it set for 3pm and someone once booked at 2:45pm and asked to checkin at 3pm.

Did your co-host not see the reservation confirmation notification in that 1 hour period? If no notification was received then check the notification settings. If the co-host just didn't see the notification then that's an issue for them to address. With same day reservations allowed, extra vigilance is required up until the cutoff time passes. Then you can relax.

Any guest can stay up to your advertised checkout time. At the moment both listings have a checkin and checkout time of 12 noon.

If someone checking out at that time causes a chengeover time issue you might consider changing your checkin time to be a few hours later than your checkout time.

I rent a room in the house where I live and have checkout at 12 noon and checkin at 3pm. I have 1 night bookings almost every day so anyone asking for an earlier checkin is informed that I won't be back at the house until 2:30 so they can't check in until after that. I don't allow checkout after 12 noon. That way I have a stress free period to change over the room and have some coffee time in the middle of the day too 🙂

Steve.