Double booking due to linked listing on AIRBNB

[Caroline2213]

I want to share my experience this week with Airbnb.  Since our company has started listing our properties in August of 2022 airbnb has been wonderful to work with.  So easy to set up your site, able to reach someone easily etc..  But wow for four days I have been emailing and calling Airbnb and finally the issue was resolved.

To explain; I have 7 properties listed with airbnb.  Two of the properties are entire homes for guests to book.  Within both homes are two individual apartments.   So a guest can book the entire home or just part of the home.  

I have had my calendar linked (by enabling on their site) to avoid double booking so the entire house is blocked when one of the apartments is rented or the apartments are blocked when the entire house is rented.  This worked perfect—-until it didn't.  I had 5 people double book recently.  Can you imagine that nightmare?  

When I called airbnb initially they did get a refund back pretty quickly for a person who was 30 days out—but that was a struggle because when she put as reason to cancel a scheduling issue on my part the site advised her that the host (me) has to cancel.  No way was I cancelling as I did nothing wrong.  I called and finally the representative called the guest and got it cancelled.  The other guest cancelled when I asked him to—although I was told I was not allowed to ask him to cancel even though one rep told me to ask the guest to cancel.  Then it took me four days to solve for the other guests so they could get reimbursed without me cancelling.  They were waring me down for sure.  

The reason they said that the double bookings occurred is because I had instant book on.  This was not told to me when I linked in the beginning and when they send me the help information—-I don't see anywhere that it says "turn off instant booking if you are linking your calendar".  Remember I was linking my calendar to a property on airbnb not on any other site.   

I guess I just want to know ……am I crazy?   Should I have known that?  But I have to say I am glad I didn't just cancel these guests and take the penalties and fees that come along it.   I fought the good fight—-but my goodness I am exhausted.  I hope I help someone by posting this.  

[Joan2709]

@Felicia268 

As @Mike-And-Jane0 mentioned, instant book is not the issue. If you manually block  dates on a calendar for personal use or direct bookings, you MUST block those dates manually on ALL the listings. Only actual guest reservations on Airbnb will block all the calendars and prevent double bookings.

This is intentional, as some Hosts block the smaller "child" listings during high season and on weekends in hopes the larger listing gets booked first. Once the larger listing is booked, you can manually unblock the smaller ones. 

Link Listings Correctly

for 3 listings with a large, all inclusive "Parent" and 2 smaller "child Listings:

Link Child A to parent

Link Child B to parent

Don't try to link the Parent to the children. I'm not sure about but if someone books child B, child A should still be able to be booked; its a separate listing, but it should block the parent. 

So for a 3 bedroom house, you have a parent listing with 3 bedrooms. Then you have a child A listing for one bedroom, and a child B listing for one bedroom. However, if you have a listing that combines 2 bedrooms together, that would be a child C and not sure how that would need to be linked to prevent Child A and Child B from being booked?

Ok....now I'm really confused.

Maybe another Host can chime in here who has actually done this?

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Joan2709 I believe there is a limit on how many variations you can have and so your child C is not possible. You could do it but would need to switch Instant Book off to avoid double bookings.

It all depends on what you can supply and what you want to achieve. For a 3 bed place I would have 

A - all 3 beds

B - just 2 beds and

C just 1 bed.

I would link A to b, A to C and B to C if this is possible. If not then I guess you can only have A and B which is reasonable as 1 bed in a 3 bed place seems to small to be financially practical.

[René374]

Hi Caroline

After I linked to Airdna and got my 1st and only dbl booking New Years nightmare I was told the only way was for me to cancel the guest, not only cost me a fee but my super host status for a year!

Airbnb told me the reason was I have a co-host and this affect the calendar?