Long Term Reservation peak season

[Melanie251]

I am new to Airbnb and so far it has been an exremely frustrating experience. I have a summer beach cottage and received tons of interest much sooner than expected and am scrambling to catch up. I have an excellent guest who loves the house and wants to rent it for 8 weeks of my summer season and a mutually agreeable price. She is ready to book! But,

1. we are having difficulty completing the transaction because we changed the dates and price of her original request and the system simply won't let us complete the booking.

2. I just realized that I won't get the money until after they check in and that they could basically cancel at any time. If they cancelled an 8 week reservation a week or even one month before, I couldn't possibly recover from that. I simply can't afford to allow cancellations of any kind. I also can't afford to wait six months to recieve the funds.

I really hate to loose this potential tenant (who is a seasoned airbnb guest) because of these stupid technical issues. I would be deeply grateful if anyone can help me.

[Paul154]

Welcome to Airbnb!

I would advise to step back from this one. You are discovering problems and do not yet have much experience with Airbnb, so do not rush into anything.

While your guest may be very nice, she is an expert and you are fresh meat, so you are correct to be wary.

As a long term landlord of 30 years, I brought my own baggage .  Due to my  bad marketing, I took whatever came and was grateful.

I stressed about scheduling and filling up weekdays and single days.

Wow! Airbnb is SOOO different than my long term landlord experience. Because they market world wide, you'll have alot of opportunity to rent in the summer and fill your calendar. Airbnb can even rent your single weekdays!

If you really like this guest, make sure you change to a STRICT booking setting. At least you'll get one month's heads up.

[Jessica-and-Henry0]

@Melanie251

For your 2nd point - host recieving payment after check-in, my understanding is this is the only payment option available to hosts. Guests pay upfront, but Airbnb holds onto the money. I understand your concern - I also host a lot of long term exchange student guests so if any one were to book 4 months in advance for a whole semester only to flake out last minute, I'd end up with an empty room for an entire semester, except for maybe the occasional short-term guest. My suggestion would be to find a different site - other than Airbnb - that allows for the type of payment and cancellation policies you are looking for, maybe somewhere that is better suited to handle vacation homes, and handle the transaction thru a different site. Even though I host a lot of long-term guests, IMHO Airbnb really is more tailored to short-term stays for the near term.

Also, you mentioned a "mutually agreeable price" but I hope you factored in host service fees (3~5%) and guest service fees (5~15%). Based on my own experience, there is a difference of about 10~15% between what the guest pays Airbnb and what I (host) recieve from Airbnb as a payout.

An 8-week stay will automatically be treated as a "long-term" reservation.

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/285/how-are-long-term-reservation-payouts-processed

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/245/how-do-i-pay-for-my-long-term-reservation

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/1361/how-do-changes-and-cancellations-work-for-long-term-reserva...

https://www.airbnb.com/home/cancellation_policies#long-term

Hope this helps~

[Melanie251]

Thank you for this feedback! I agree, Airbnb is not a viable option for longer stays. I have told the guests that I can not accept long term via Airbnb. This is a local market, though, so I’ll go back to the traditional methods for booking my shore rental and only use Airbnb for off season weekends.

It’s such a shame! I worked hard to negotiate a good deal with this guest. It would have been great for both of us! I’d much rather have one family for 8 weeks only staying on the weekends than 8 separate one week stays.