Airbnb is pressuring hosts to accept bookings in two ways, Instant Book and the new policy to permanently block your calendar for not accepting or denying a booking request within 24 hours. I have always thought that Instant Book is counter to the founding principles of Airbnb and have said so at every opportunity. The new policy of blocking your calendar causes problems for us when we try to extract some information from a potential guest and they just do not respond within 24 hours. This leaves the only recourse of denying the request (and I do not think this is what Airbnb wants). We have many newbie guests who have no profile (I thought there was once an effort to prevent this) and are very reticent to share any information even though they are coming to our home. This is NOT a hotel and we need to VET guests without time pressure from Airbnb.
Airbnb has been very good in almost every way, but I sense more and more of the corporate mind at work.