Greetings, Airbnb Community. We are new hosts, not even a full week into hosting yet, and when we were setting up, we saw that there is a fairly new feature, still in BETA mode, called "Non-Refundable."
I imagine that most of you are already familiar with this, but for those who are not, Non-Refundable basically give guests another option when they are considering booking your place to save an additional 10% if they choose it. But of course, once they do, they cannot cancel their reservation without losing their money.
Here's my concern with it. Imagine that a guest chooses this option to save money, but then days before their arrival date, there's a family emergency for the guest, or something like that. The guest writes and says, "I know that I chose non-refundable, but XXX just happened, and so we'd really appreciate it if you would give us our money back."
In this situation, the host is kind of screwed. If they don't give the money back (or a part of it), then they will almost certainly end up getting a bad review when they did nothing wrong. But if they do give some or all of the money back, then they lose the earnings they could have made from another guest. It is also only days before the booking date, meaning that the chances of booking someone else in for those dates is very, very low.
Based on that, do you think it is worth it to include the Non-Refundable option? I read that it has been around since the end of last year, which means that at least some of you must have used it by now. So, we'd really like to hear your experiences with it, and find out if, after using it, you decided to stick with it or eliminate it from your listing.
Thanks a lot.