Guest has 24hrs to pay after booking - but then they start negotiating

[Simon364]

I posted before about the problems of some guests being given 24 hours to pay, after they have made a booking (so it isn't confirmed)

I don't understand how this can happen , since every booking I made on AirBnB it wasn't confirmed until the credit-card payment was confirmed. I have also noticed that recently there have been more posts on this issue here. It is certainly a new thing by AirBnB because I have only had it in the last 12-18 months or so

Some of the previous community replies have been along the lines of , foreign CC not confirmed etc

But in this case, it seems that the guest  is also able to make the booking and then also deliberately delay payment. I got a 35 day booking and obviously I have to decide to accept or not (which I did). Then the message "the guest has 24 hours to pay" came up.

Shortly after , the guest wanted to negotiate the terms of the booking - eg they want to pay weekly. This isn't acceptable ,  and additionally I am not in a position to decline the guest . (In these situations, even if the guest comes , they are less likely to leave good review)

Does anyone have any advice please?

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Simon364 just tell the guest all payments are in the hands of Airbnb and that you have no influence over them (which is true). Paying weekly is not an Airbnb option unless the guest books a week at a time which means the calendar will not be blocked for them and they may pay more depending on the discounts you offer.

[Simon364]

thanks - additionally I mentioned that if they booked a week at a time, they would also be paying the fixed cleaning fee

[Huma0 · Accepted solution]

@Simon364 

I am not sure if it is a new thing, but it might be becoming more common. Certainly, I have always had to pay also at the time of booking when I made any reservations on Airbnb. 

The strangest one I got was about a year ago, when a guest instant booked and the payment was still showing as pending. This turned out to be a third party booking, so I got Airbnb to cancel it penalty free for the guest and one of the people actually staying then instant booked it. But, she then said she would make payment after I answered some questions.

How can this be? How is a guest about to instant book a listing and then decide WHEN they will pay for it? I would say she was confused, but I could see from the booking (which said confirmed) that the payment was pending again... Anyway, I never got to the bottom of that one as she then upped the guest count over my maximum, was demanding to quarantine at my shared listing etc. etc. so I had to get that one cancelled as well!

As for advice, basically what @Mike-And-Jane0 said. Anytime a guest makes odd requests about payments, I just tell them I don't handle that, Airbnb does.

[Simon364]

This is the fifth "they have 24 hours to make their payment" I have had in the last year or so. So my calendar is locked off at busy times for 24hrs

What concerns me is not only that this might be an accident of the payment system (eg strange foreign credit card), but also there is a technique to do it deliberately in order to pressurise the host.

many thanks for your reply

[Huma0]

@Simon364 

I don't know to be honest. If there is a technique that guests can use, I haven't come across it, but there are websites/social media accounts and groups out there dedicated to informing guests how to scam hosts, so it wouldn't surprise me that much.

On the other hand... I host long term stays and occasionally some of them are very long, i.e. six months or more. With these very long term guests, I find that Airbnb sends me an email every single month saying there was a problem collecting payment, and then another email saying it was resolved. I have no idea why that happens, but these have been guests that I totally trust in that respect, and the guests' payment method is not going to be expiring every single month, so I have just assumed it's some incompetence on Airbnb's part.

[Fred13]

In essence what the guest is after is: lock the place for 35 days but pay in a manner (weekly) that gives them the  option to leave on any given week. How creative.

Simple, you tell them they are welcomed to stay for a week at a time, but IF someone else books the place ahead of them they will have to leave. Watch them stupidly say - "but we are booking it for 35 days" - no they are not, just a week at a time by willing to only pay weekly.

Also, IF the payment didn't go through yet, it may mean they can't afford to pay for the whole 35-day stay now. Red Flag - 🇲🇦.

[Simon364]

Yes, this is what I thought . In the end I explained their options to them .

The frustration was that the booking calendar was locked for 24hours until they decided not to pay - and there is a conference here, so its a bad time to have calendar locked

Additionally, I don't like to have guests that are not completely happy with the payment system , as I'm less likely to get 5 star review

Thank you

[Pat271]

@Simon364  I have had guests with delayed payment (and therefore a locked calendar) as well. In most cases, they were all just due to an expired card, which the guest wouldn’t notice for hours. In one case, the guest ended up not providing the details at all and so never booked, but my calendar was still locked for 24 hours. This seems really unfair to the host.

I don’t understand why Airbnb doesn’t handle the approval FIRST, before finalizing the booking and blocking the days. This seems the logical way to do it, and is what is imposed whenever I use other online reservation systems. Reservation requests are treated as inquiries until all of the details like credit card verification are sorted out. At times, I’ve even had reservations yanked from under me while I was updating my card.

[Simon364]

Yes its definitely getting more common. And as you say, the card should be fully approved before the booking is made!