I have my availability set to 3 months. Last night I got a notification that a reservation was confirmed for October 8-11. I immediately double checked my calendar settings and the latest anyone should be able to reserve is September 23. The dates before and after the reservation are all “unavailable until July.” Has this happened to anyone else? Now, the odd thing that the weekend that was booked is the first week of Jazzfest and is a prime weekend, so I’m happy enough that it is booked, but I had tried to make the second weekend of Jazzfest available to a guest who was booked for Jazzfest when it was cancelled due to lockdown and had reached out to book this year . I couldn’t make those dates available so I have physically blocked those dates for her so we could set the booking up together when it was available. Not sure if its a glitch or what. As I said, I have no problem with this particular booking, but if it could have been a sticky situation if I had other plans for the apartment and hadn’t updated my calendar yet.
Airbnb often allows bookings on blocked dates
You can ask them to cancel penalty free if they’ve allowed guest to book on blocked dates @nolabelle
I don’t know why a booking was allowed more than 90 days out BUT I can help with opening the second weekend to your other guests
I think if they request to book any of your available days and you send them a booking alteration request to the 2nd weekend, it will work. Coordinate with your guest to respond quickly because you will need to remove your manual block.
Interesting. This is the first time it’s happened to me.
Thanks for the tip. She and I have already made plans to unblock the rooms at a specific time and date, but I will see if what you suggest works as that would be a good tactic to have in my hosting tool kit!
Awesome line up this year, btw.
You should be able to have Air cancel at no penalty, as it is clearly a tech glitch.
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If, as one might expect, you could bump up your rate for that time period, we would absolutely force Air to cancel, and make sure the rates were appropriately high for a special time/event.
Happened to me 8 times now
Happened to me last winter.
Yes! It looks fantastic!
Thankfully I sat down and adjusted my rates when they announced that Jazzfest would be happening in October. There is no problem with this reservation, I was just surprised that it managed to happen.
Phew! Good for you! Just in case of more “Air screwups”, you may wish to consider bumping rates that are out of your window. If it happens again, you’ll get an automatic premium …
Please help me understand your statement – for instance, if I block my calendar for the first week of September, are you saying that Airbnb may allow someone to book his/her stay for the blocked period?
Yep! The website is very very glitchy. One way to safeguard a blocked date is to put an utterly insane nightly rate on it.
One solution to Airbnb “opening up” blocked nights is to use a channel manager.
Instead of Airbnb having control over your calendar, the situation is reversed, i.e. in simple terms, Airbnb has to ask the channel manager if a night is available. If it’s blocked in the channel manager, none of your linked OTA’s can book it. This only works when using the XML/API type connection.
JF
@Debthecat Deb, thank you for the shocking info that the system may overrule blocked dates! Thank you for the suggestion of placing outlandish rates during the blocked periods; will do!
Believe me, I do! I’m always afraid I will lose track of how the three month window creeps along. As soon as Mardi Gras, Jazzfest, Essence Fest, Voodoo, etc. pass I sit down and look up the dates for the following year and put in my special event rates. As I said, this booking was not problematic because my rates were already in place, I was just surprised it was allowed. Happy to hear I could cancel penalty free if I needed to though.
I’ve had it happen to me about 8 times when they have allowed bookings on dates I block out for changeovers
For several reasons, I use a 2ndary OTA site to block dates on Air, BDC, etc.
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This way, we never have to worry about “some glitch on Air opening up our calendar past the 90 day window”. We often do not want anything booked past 45/60 days anyway. So, while Air might be “min 90” we can enforce what we want that matches our business needs (over 30 days, special days/weekends, over 90 days, etc).
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For instance mrbandb has a very easy to use site and nice calendar system. So, it is rather convenient for me to use it to block stuff that applies to all other OTAs. So far, this has always worked. Shortly, we’ll do the same using a channel manager.