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Duane – thank you so much for your email response! I’ve made some changes based on your suggestions (discounts for weekly/monthly stays) and adjusted to a 2-night minimum. I’m also reaching out to local hospitals and universities to see if they have a need for short-term housing for doctors and professors they are recruiting or who are visiting. Great ideas – thank you !
My place is in Maine by the way – I think I will be entertaining more vacationers than people looking for a trip to the big city
Thanks again and best of luck – I find the hosts on the site so helpful.
Sorry, I don’t understand this bit. Was this a approval-required booking request or an instant booking? In the former case, you could’ve refused to accept, in the latter, you have the right to cancel.
The solution to sudden calendar unblockings due to Airbnb glitches I’ve found is to set the base price very high, so no-one books in such scenarios. I periodically look at the last days of my 3-month open period and change the prices to something more reasonable.
Hopefully, such a strategy will help you (and other hosts) avoid such an eventuality in the future.
Aww Astaire Don’t be dejected. Did they say anything bad in the review or was it just the rating? Can I ask how many reviews you have?
The whole 5* or nothing is crazy. 4* = Good.
The other thing to bear in mind is that many new guests don’t trust a place that has consistent glowing reviews, they think it’s all too good to be true and seems fake. So the odd not-so-great review makes you look real. It’s true - I read it on the internet! (Seriously, it has been featured as an issue in some articles).
I have 120+
The review itself was worded very nicely. It was the rating.
I think what I struggle with is when I think the stay went well and I had made the guest happy in every way and then you get a 4. Those I know beforehand weren’t perfect, the guest wasn’t happy about something - it doesn’t shock me when I get low ratings for them.
Sentiment shmentiment, just gimme the cash! (Joking, of course.)
Yes, there’s a special sting about those low reviews/ratings when you thought everything went well. Even though I’ve trained myself to expect nothing it still takes me by surprise when it happens. But then you have to balance it against the lovely surprise when those miserable monosyllabic guests, whose review you were dreading, leave 5* and say your place was great and they had a wonderful time.
It was IB and cancelling caused us to lose SH status in the July 1 assessment period. I had emailed my displeasure to ABB CS and they did get back to me that they had removed the host penalty for cancellation and that I’m eligible for SH status again at the Oct 1 assessment.
Or … the vendor could just make their software work properly As an IT professional myself, I am not excited about work-arounds. Frankly, I’d rather the vendor work harder to get it right.
Glad I could help Nina. If you could get in with the various institutions around your area you could get on a list of places they might recommend. Not sure what department that would be but it might be worth the effort to ask around.
Being an IT professional does not mean being impractical. How Airbnb software behaves is not in your (or my) hands, so my point is, how we, as hosts plagued by this glitch, can find a workable solution on this forum.
Good luck getting Airbnb to write perfect software!
Which also makes your statement
As an IT professional myself, I am not excited about work-arounds.
all the more astonishing!
An IT person knows only too damn intimately that software (a bit like life) never works perfectly, and workarounds are a part and parcel of the information technology industry.
Ever rebooted your computer to work around a program gotten really slow instead of waiting for it release its buffers, discard its null pointers, fix the memory leak, clear its cache and do all the other good things software should do in this perfect world you wish to live in?
Don’t be dejected. Did they say anything bad in the review or was it just the rating? Can I ask how many reviews you have?
As an IT professional myself, I am not excited about work-arounds. Frankly, I’d rather the vendor work harder to get it right.
One of my favorite movies!