Desperately need the ability to synchronise internal calendars

Desperately need the ability to synchronise internal calendars

I have 5 listings on Airbnb, all for the same place.  

 

Listing 1 =  all three bedrooms booked as an Entire Place.  Listing 2 =  two bedrooms booked as an 'Entire Place'.  The other three - i.e. listings 3, 4 and 5 - are each of the individual bedrooms listed as a 'Private Room'.    

 

When listing 1 is booked, listings 2 - 5 need to be marked as unavailable.  When 2 is booked 1, 3, 4, & 5 are unavailable.  When 3, 4, or 5 are booked, listings 1 and 2 are unavailable.  

 

You can imagine the chaos that ensues if I'm not quick off the mark in blocking out the other listings when one of the other listings is booked.  It also doesn't help that the calendar has now developed this interesting glitch of randomly unblocking dates that were previously blocked.  This happened to me recently and resulted in the need to cancel for the first time.

 

If I could synchronise my calendars with each other to reflect the relationship between each listing and the subsequent impact on availability, then this would make my life a whole lot easier.  It would also mean that I could enable Instant Book across all 5 listings as well as reducing the likelihood of my needing to cancel a booking because of an availability conflict.  

 

The capability to internally synch would result in;

(1) less cancellations = more 'love' for the Airbnb brand,

(2) increased propensity to book because hosts could enable Instant Book.  Presumably, guests want to book without interaction with host, therefore IB is preferred = more bookings through the platform,

(3) less cancellations = more brand love + use of CX resources.  

 

Given all that, why not do it?  It's complicated but it would pay for itself in a heartbeat.

6 Comments
Dede0
Level 10

@Louise0 I just have a single listing so I haven't run into this issue. It blows my mind that AirBnB hasn't dealt with it long before now! They definitely should.

Nicole133
Level 2

WOW!  That does sound like a major headache!  We have only had one listing at a time as well, so haven't had to deal with this, but your suggestion is spot on... Hope this gets resolved soon.

Mary-Ann0
Level 10

@Louise0 - I wish you good luck with that.  I only have one listing but I gave a thumbs-up cause if I was fortunate enough to have more listings I would need all the help I could get.  I should think Airbnb would want to help - it would help them too.

 

 

My wife has a single apartment for 4 listed, but we are consider renting another apartment in the same house. I was also thinking how to attract groups of 8 people, so this would really be very helpful to us!

 

Ante

Lizzie
Former Community Manager
Status changed to: Archived
 
Amy205
Level 1

AirBnB has a bug in it's software which make it's calendar NOT synch reliably.  I find it super unhelpful with several other features that point to a bias AirBNB has to customers and not to HOSTs.  Hope they fix that soon as it detroys the "network effect" they are trying to set up with drawing in more hosts to serve more customers.

 

Compared to Homeaway / VRBO (now owned by Expedia) - AirBNB has poor customer service for hosts, less flexibility for hosts, they hide phone numbers of customer/hosts etc. precluding hosts from providing better customer service because they are paranoid about transactions off platform.  Even the mobile app is far worse for AirBNB.