So now that Airbnb wants to measure how often we decline reservations and is threatening to penalize us for it-- what are my options?
You see, I rent a space that is most often used as a wedding venue and people are desperately trying to book it far in advance. Unfortunately, the phone app that most people use is pretty worthless for dates beyond a year into the future. AND as it's about their wedding, even if they see that dates are unavailable (and I put into our opening description that those dates are unavailable), they STILL want to ask if those dates are available. And as Airbnb doesn't allow anyone to make an inquiry without inputting dates, they end up putting in dates that they don't really want.
The result of all this is that I end up declining nearly HALF of the requests that I get and the majority of those are because of "guest is asking for different dates"!
Until Airbnb stops forcing guests to input dates just to ask a question, I don't see my situation changing any time soon.
Soooo-- what is the better option now? Should I just respond with a message and let their request "expire"? Does my message even count as a "response" to Airbnb's system? Does letting the request "expire" count the same as "declining"?