No Pre-approval option. Only accepting request.

Francine-And-David0
Level 2
Vancouver, Canada

No Pre-approval option. Only accepting request.

Hello,

 

AirBnb novice here! So straight to the point here... I have noticed recently with the last few requests that I do not have the option to just pre-approve a request. It only gives the option to "Respond Now" and when I click it, it brings me to a receipt like page and I can only "Accept or Decline" the reservation. 

 

Why does this happen? It doesn't happen with all my reservations. Just some of them. A couple of times this has happened with a few reservations. Also, I must mention, that this is happening on my Airbnb App! 

 

Any suggestions or advice is greatly appreciated.

 

Thank you all for your help!

 

 

3 Replies 3
Dede0
Level 10
Austin, TX

I think you may be confusing actual Booking Requests with mere Pre-Approval inquiries.

 

A pre-approval inquiry comes from a potential guest who hasn't fully decided that they want to book. They may send inquiries to multiple hosts but those inquiries don't commit the guest to anything. As a host, you're given the option of pre-approving the guest or declining to pre-approve. If you pre-approve, the guest has 24 hours to book (without further approval from you) before your approval expires. During that time, your listing isn't blocked and you can, in fact, accept any other booking request or pre-approval request.

 

A Booking request doesn't arrive to you with a pre-approve option. Instead, you can either Accept the booking or Decline it. By making a Booking request instead of a pre-approval inquiry, the potential guest has made a commitment to you and to AirBnB. If you approve the booking, they're booked. At that time, they owe AirBnB their service fee, and depending on your chosen cancellation policy, they're committed to paying you for their stay (if they stay) or all or part of it (or even none of it) should they cancel by certain dates.

 

AirBnB's "Help" center has lots more about all of this. I suggest looking there first when you have questions. For example, here are *their* words about Pre-Approvals:

 

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/838/what-is-a-pre-approval

Thank you @Dede0 I have read that Pre-approval help page many times in hopes of finding the answer. Unfortunately, it didn't explain that guests have the option to also do a Booking request right from the get go. Thank you for explaining that, as I have not travelled as a guest myself on Airbnb. Good to know that they have this option to do this.

@Francine-And-David0, I understand how that can be confusing. In our case it was sort of the opposite. We got nothing but Booking requests at first and then one day, up popped a Pre-Approval request, and we knew nothing about how that worked.

 

Anyway, now that we've gained more experience, we do almost the same thing in either case. We have a set of pre-written "boilerplate" messages that we send for each particular situation. In the case of a Booking request or Pre-Approval request, we send a message that starts with some "Thanks for contacting us. Hope to have you as a guest" happy talk. We then ask that before we'll approve their request, they should read our brief House Rules (included; they're short) and Cancellation Policy (we point out that they can view that from a link in our listing) and then let us know if they're okay with all of that. We don't accept the Booking or pre-approve them until we hear back from them. I also set an alarm on my iPhone for 6-8 hours out to remind me to accept/decline before AirBnB's 24-hour response window has passed. I usually make my decision well before the deadline for two reasons: 1) Lookers who don't respond within 6-8 hours probably aren't the kind of guests we want, and 2) booking requests (but not pre-approval requests) block the calendar for the requested dates and I don't want it to stay blocked for too long.

 

Happy hosting!