Hosting women only

[Jane563]

I had a request to book from a male this morning.  As he is not British I got caught out by his first name, and didn’t realise until I had accepted and was able to see his photo.

I state in my heading, description text and house rules that I will only accept women guests. 

I have called airbnb and after a bit of argument have got them to cancel, but am told this is a one time exception. If this happens again I will be penalized.

Apparently I am supposed to confirm a guest’s gender before accepting the booking. WTF? I’m wondering if this could cause offence.

I do remember getting an email about this a while ago. I believe it said that single female hosts should use request to book and would be happy to cancel penalty free in these circumstances. It was also mentioned that a toggle might be introduced so that hosts could turn it on, if they only wanted to accept guests of the same gender if renting in their home.

If I remember these details right, I was wondering if anyone had saved that email and could copy and paste below.

Thank yoiu

[Jim472]

There's a setting somewhere that restricts booking to same sex only. Maybe customer service gave you grief because it wasn't selected. I wish I could be more specific but I now rent my entire place and the setting is only available when you're sharing a room in your house. 

[Lawrene0]

@Jane563 , if you haven't already, go to Help at the top of your dashboard and type the search word: gender.

That will get you the step-by-step. 

[Jane563]

I can’t see the setting. Is that because I use request to book?

[Lawrene0]

I have IB, @Jane563 , and so just looked to see whether I could set our bedroom listing to one gender only. There is no actual setting to toggle. It needs to be written in as a custom rule.  

You have done that. 

Ah, but I see that IB does come into it. If you look at "When can I cancel a reservation based on gender?" the first bullet point for penalty-free is "The reservation was booked using Instant Book".

So you will indeed need to ask everyone, before approving the booking request, whether they are female. If you aren't comfortable with "Are you female?" maybe just ask whether they read that it is solo female travellers only and whether they fall into that category.