Help with daily booking requests

[Susie351]

I have been getting many booking requests daily now in Chinese, asking very odd questions and requesting to book, I have delt with this in various ways, trying to communicate with the guests asking more questions, there is never a reply, if you accept the booking, no one books, so I have been declining asking for Airbnb's help, but nothing as yet. 

They are definitely not legitimate, I don't really understand them, bots? 

It's just a massive pain to go through the process of declining and having to write why each time, asking Airbnb for assistance and nothing happening? Also trying to maintain my response rate.

Has anyone else had this happen to them please?

**[Title updated by OCM for context in line with the Community Center Guidelines]

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Susie351 BAD MISTAKE I am afraid. Scammers are extremely irritating but declining you hurts you not them. All the Airbnb system sees is that you do not want business so they will send you less business by dropping you in the search results.

What you should do is just respond to the inquiry with a dot '.' and move on. This maintains your response rate. If it is an inquiry (it will be) then you do not have to accept or decline. Just ignore these as declining can be damaging to you.

If it is a booking request then you do need to accept/decline and accepting will immediately create a booking (hence why I know these are not requests).

Hope this helps

[Shelley159]

Hi @Susie351 

If it's just an "Inquiry", you don't have to pre-approve or decline (you only need to Approve or Decline if it's a "Request to Book", which these probably are not).

Simply type anything in the message section and send it, and the clock will stop ticking and your response rate will not be affected. You can simply write a one-liner that you're not interested and move on.

I agree that it's not good to decline too often, so for unwanted Inquiries it's better to just respond in a message.

[Joan2709]

@Susie351 

Be sure to also flag the message as a potential scam...that will prevent the guest from trying again. Click the 3 dots on the message and "Report this message".

[Susie351]

Thank you Joan, I have been reporting each one. Finally managed to talk to someone from Airbnb today via a wifi call and they said it is suspicious and they will look into it. Thought it might be someone trying to bring my credit rating down and they will stop them, fingers crossed, will know in a few days.

Thank you again for taking the time to reply x