Today has been a challenge.
A German lady with children, who we specifically do not allow, attempted to book. How she could see the listing when we have both child brackets disabled is beyond me. Regardless, she has not proven her identity, and so her booking was set to pending. For 6 hours, until there was no room left in the day to want to accept bookings (it's 6:30pm now) she did not answer AirBnB calls and did not respond to messages in English. AirBnB stated that they could not cancel her booking within the 12 hour pending status, stating that the guest had 12 hours to provide ID irrespective. This is a concept that makes sense for future bookings - but what if, like for our booking, it is for the same day? They have the ability to disable your calendar by way of not showing ID and so stalling any potential bookings for 12 hours..
Which got me thinking;
What's to stop vindictive and competitive John or Mary citizen from setting up a myriad of burner email accounts and booking (without ID) to a host of their surroundings listings, essentially narrowing down bookings to their own listing by way of making the rest of their localities listings invisible, as they would all be pending fake requests that had not yet supplied ID. After all, there's nothing you can do - there's nothing those hosts can do - to cancel those requests. That's bad. That's actually really bad.
This is essentially what happened to me this afternoon. I disabled instant booking as I wanted to set the date to be able to book much, much later on, get some cash in the door quickly, but veto anyone that booked. So it made sense, in that case, to disable IB and set the price cheaply. However, this lady booked and clogged my listing for 6 hours immediately, and there was nothing I could do. AirBnB refused or couldn't cancel her booking as it was set to pending even though they could see that she had not accepted the rules, and had made it clear that she had children which we specifically reject.
So we've lost money tonight, and while the world will go on, it's been a pain in the behind to say the least and I'm frustrated as all hell. Anyone else had similar experiences?