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There is no penalty for declining a reservation request. And it has no relationship to cancellation rate and it does not have a direct influence on SuperHost status.
Whether you decline or accept a reservation request is only tallied under Acceptance Rate, which is part of the Basic Requirements, not the SuperHost requirements. Furthermore, Airbnb’s “target goal” for your Acceptance Rate is only 88%, so it is absolute fine (and even expected) that you would decline some requests. And for those hosts with more that one listing, you should know that the Acceptance Rate is per listing and not total, e.g. declining a reservation on one listing has no effect on your Acceptance Rate of your other listings.
I have seen it discussed thoroughly elsewhere that, anecdotally, falling below an 88% Acceptance Rate doesn’t even seem to be enforced. I, myself, have had a 79% acceptance rate at one time on one of my listings (I declined a request after only having 4 reservations) and maintained my Superhost status and never received any warning or penalty at all, not even a finger-wag, but 88% is always legitimate.
Acceptance Rate different than the Response Rate that actually does affect SuperHost status but it only requires a response and not an acceptance - a decline would be considered a response for Response Rate.
Because Acceptance Rate only needs to be 88%, it is absolutely fine for a host to just outright decline a request. All reservations, whether instant book or not count towards the Acceptance Rate. This means that for a host that has 50 reservations a year, they could decline 6 requests outright and still meet the Acceptance Rate target goal of the Basic Requirements.
And for anyone wondering, I’ve seen no evidence that Acceptance Rate effects search ranking either, but don’t know for sure, of course.
Technically correct, but Airbnb now sends warnings to hosts about being suspended for “too many” declines. Someone reported they got one after 3 declines, but I don’t know if that caused their Acceptance rate to fall below a certain percentage.
Maybe they say something if it’s too many within a certain amount of time. Or maybe it’s something they enforce inconsistently. But it probably dropped their acceptance rate and maybe too quickly - 3 in a short period without other bookings would definitely drop the rate. I definitely wouldn’t worry about the occasional decline.
It’s easy to keep track of the percentage, it’s under Basic Requirements.
A lot of those posts I’ve read about being warned about too many declines seem to be from hosts who use IB, and don’t understand how to deal with requests. They are just automatically declining every guest who doesn’t show verifications or reviews, as if it were IB.
They don’t seem to realize that because requests allow hosts to communicate before accepting, there’s no reason to just decline any guest who doesn’t meet IB requirements. Plenty of newbie guests are fine, you just have to feel them out.
So if they’re just declining every request from a newbie, instead of politely asking them to please upload verified ID to the site, and doing some messaging to see if the guest sounds respectful, obviously they’re going to be declining a lot.
I have back to back, 3 bookings this weekend. None had reviews though 2 were members since 2016 and one since last November. I accepted all of them straight away with no “vetting.” 2 of the 3 have pets. If I have problems I’ll report back.
In talking to my guests this morning, they indicated that this is not their first Airbnb stay though I don’t know how recently their first one may have been. But they have no reviews and it occurs to me that maybe some of these guests with no reviews simply had one of those selfish hosts who can’t be bothered to leave reviews. The guest leaving today was excellent and it’s hard to imagine that their previous host didn’t review them because it woudn’t have been a postive review. They live in a town 3 hours away and have already said I will be their “go to” Airbnb when they come to town if I’m available.
Only once did a request expire before I answered it. And that was due to an Airbnb glitch, of course, where they had stopped sending me text notifications.
It dinged my Response rate, rather than registering as a decline. But that was years ago, and things may have changed.
This article @JJD posted in a thread I started about declining an inquiry should be read by everyone. I see this discussion involves IB but definitely read this! And thanks to @JJD for finding it! It was last updated April 2021
