Linking calendars between primary hosts and co-hosts and between primary listings and "sub-listings"

[David1473]

My wife and I are co-hosting 4 listings--3 individual private rooms and one "Three Bedroom Suite" that comprises all three individual rooms. We set up our three individual rooms under her name with her as primary host for the three individual rooms and she is now a Superhost, and we set up our Three Bedroom Suite under my name with me as Primary host and I am now a Superhost. I have been the one who takes primary responsibility to manage all four of our listings since my wife has another fulltime job. As things stand, we have not been able to link our calendars between these four listings because Airbnb does not enable that to happen between listings under separate names. All four do not populate under the Link Calendars link under Availability for either of us and so it is impossible for us to choose our Three Bedroom Suite as the Primary Listing (as necessary to have the linking function to avoid double bookings between our Three Bedroom Suite and the individual rooms). We tried changing  me to Primary Host on her Listings but that does not correct the problem. Those listings still do not populate under my name. We have been told by Airbnb's Support Team that the only way to make this work would be to close out our three individual rooms under my wife's name and start over from scratch to list those under my name, in which case we would loose all the reviews we have acquired under those listings. As we've considered this, we don't want to do that, and we've also felt it is of value for my wife to be listed as the primary host for those rooms so that women guests who don't know me may feel more comfortable making bookings for those--unfortunately a consideration for many women in many cultures and perhaps especially now in our country, despite our very positive reviews. If we would lose those reviews, we would loose that trust we have established and which are documented in our reviews. I would like to makee the request of Airbnb's technical teams to develop the capacity on your website to link calendars between co-hosts such as we, who share primary hosting and listing ownerships between us on an equal basis. I am convinced that would be the best solution to this scenario. I have appreciated very much Airbnb's Support Team case manager who has walked with us through this  attempt to link our calendars, and for their suggestion that we take this here to our Community Forum for our collective input and voice to add weight to expedite this request to take action to help us in this regard.  This does not seem to me to be asking much for a competent web development team to enable. Thanks so much to Airbnb's Support Team for your help thus far, and in advance to Technical Staff for your help on this next piece to make this possible.

[Alice-and-Jeff0]

The community forums are mostly manned by other hosts and not typically researched for requests/feedback, @David1473.  Hopefully they will see your request.  

Unfortunately, your situation is really unique.  The vast majority of host/co-host relationships are for different properties, not the same one with 2 different listing types.  Most hosts would have have giving you the heads up that this was going to be an issue with coordinating calendars and that it would need to be manually handled.  That being said, I understand what you want, but I don't know if Airbnb is going to spend the time building that out. 

On the other hand, in my opinion, you are making too much of the reviews and superhost status that you both have.  Since you are most concerned about the female-factor, close the listing under your own name (or better yet, just snooze it indefinitely) and have your wife add you as the co-host to her properties.  Then add the 3-bedroom suite to her profile as a "new" and in the very first line of the listing say: XX and David have consolidated their listings.  All the awesome reviews for this 3-bedroom suite property can be found under co-host David's profile. People can click through to your profile and then see all the good reviews you've earned for that 3-bedroom suite.  (You will, however, lose the extra benefit of earning 2 Superhost bonuses every year).  Also  you will , when a woman is searching for a property, your wife will always come up as the primary host, so they will feel comfortable booking with a woman.  

Good luck.  

[David1473]

Thanks for your thoughts, Alice and Jeff. Mary Ann and I are already co-hosts on each others' listings and we've been managing to coordinate our calendars manually for the past year and a half since we opened. We each get notifications by email for both our listings. And we have been doing fine with all that so far, no double bookings yet since we've been able to respond fairly quickly to block what needs to be blocked to avoid them. It's just that our calendars cannot be linked as it stands, and as we have been getting busier that possibility may well happen that two booking requests come in virtually at the same time that would create a conflict. Perhaps it would be just as well if we can then choose which one is more lucrative, though somehow that seems unfair to the one that should be first-come-first-served.

It occurs to me that a solution to the gender factor would be to combine our names as you've done, which I like. However, I don't like the idea of needing to rebuild one or the other set of listings over from scratch, and losing half of our reviews in the process, just to link these calendars. There has to be an better way. And it seems like it would be a simple technical fix to change the settings to allow calendar linking between co-hosts.