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Hi there,
My listing went live on December 2nd for the first time and I just received a request for a month. My question is how do I get a little more information on the guest before accepting. The guest has been verified but there is no review since they joined this month. I too have no reviews. Will the guest be offended if I ask a few questions before accepting?
Who cares? You don’t want to risk your listing. I wouldn’t accept the booking for these reasons:
A month in the US gets a guest tenant rights. The risk of a squatter is low but real. Schemers especially look for new hosts like you who they suspect they can easily dupe.
Airbnb is not the way to do a month stay. You need a lease, deposit, etc. Change your settings to a much shorter max stay until you get your feet under you.
One reason for multiple short stays is so you can get (hopefully) multiple good reviews quickly. New hosts get a boost in the search ranking and you don’t want to waste yours with a one month stay.
Now go decline and change your settings, stat! The question of how to get more information on guests can be answered later today.
This is now a Long Term Rental and not a good idea through Air. Many scammers target new hosts like this.
Just. Say. NO.
Ditto what @KKC wrote.
Change your length of rental to 14 days. Then don’t decline, tell guest it’s not a good fit. Plus, once you change your number of days, Air’s system should dump them out.
Message Air and say that as a new host you’re not comfortable with this as your first guest and that you’ve changed your max stay to 14 days and would they please cancel the guest so YOU don’t get dinged by Air for the first person.
It seems to be a request, not a booking. No need to call.
I kind of doubt that. Once the request is pending, I would assume it only affects things going forward, but you may be right.
Make sure you understand the difference between a request and an inquiry message. A lot of new hosts don’t, and use the terms interchangeably. If it’s an inquiry, all that’s required is that you answer the guest’s message. No need to click the decline button. (Airbnb will send you threatening messages if you decline “too much”, so no reason to use up declines on an inquiry.
If it’s a request, you do need to either accept or decline within 24 hrs, unless the guest withdraws the request before then.
Requests block your calendar. Inquiries don’t. And I wrote “Message,” not “Call.”
Again “should,” not “will.”
This is the crux of your canceling. If an inquiry, it will expire and hasn’t blocked your calendar. In which case, you can block a few days and the system should say “no longer available” or some such nonsense (I’ve done this before and it’s been a great way to decline guests who aren’t a good fit while maintaining my response rate and not getting dinged by Air for a decline). If a request, message Air and change your settings, in reverse order.
@kalarkai Did you do the 20% off your first 3 bookings thing Air recommends? How about a week or month long discount?
There’s a reason you’ve been hit with a long stay upfront and why it’s exactly 30 days.
Please, please don’t accept this booking. I was taken advantage of when I first went online. They look for “us”, as someone said. Even if it’s legit, it’s too long as has been pointed out.
I’d also limit my stays to 7 days (or less like @KKC suggests) to start & don’t open your calendar beyond 3 months until the 20% discount on the first 3 bookings is done.
Be sure there aren’t any special days coming where your price should be higher. For example, Christmas week & New Year’s which this reservation would eat up!!
You need several short, great stays to jumpstart you. Kill any discounts for now except the 20% if you did it & mark up your price so you are both competitive & get what you want while the 20% is active.
Just my 2 cents. And please do a lot of reading here on the forum.
This article explains inquires vs requests in case you need the info:
https://www.airbnb.com/resources/hosting-homes/a/understanding-response-rate-and-acceptance-rate-86
I see what you were getting at. But “cancelling” to me means cancelling a confirmed booking. It wasn’t clear that you were referring to asking Airbnb to clear the request so it didn’t continue to block her calendar.
And yes, I’m well aware that a request blocks the calendar and an inquiry doesn’t. That’s one reason I mentioned that this new host needs to be aware of the difference. Sometimes new hosts are totally unaware and refer to an inquiry as a request.
For a beginner I’d set max stay at 4-5 days. At 14 days, with time between bookings, you could be looking at zero reviews during what is believed to be the boost period.
Be careful, it might be a squatter. If they have children, it will be very difficult to evict quickly.
No. But if by some chance they are offended, then they won’t want to stay with you and you wouldn’t want them anyway.
Pay attention to what others have said above about long-termers. Airbnb isn’t the place for that and you’ll need proper leases and rent books if you go down that route. Most of my guests are 3 - 5 days - more money. more reviews, more repeats, more referrals.
Be sure not to give huge discounts in order to get your listing off the ground. Check your STR insurance too and make sure that you are operating within local laws and charging any local taxes due.
Finally, welcome to the forum and to hosting. Read as much as you can here - you’ll learn so much.
If don’t have it, get it. Airbnb’s alleged cover isn’t worth a penny, as many hosts have found out to their (financial) detriment.
As a new host, generally you’re looking for those first three reviews to get you kick started.
Only open your calendar for four weeks or so, restrict stays to only a few days and use the 20% discount Airbnb offers for new listings. Be competitive in comparison to other local listings.
Once you’ve got three or four bookings, ramp your prices up to normal levels and adjust your minimum stay to what your market needs. Open your calendar up to what you feel comfortable with and hope your first few reviews are solid.
Works every time, or you’ll get your money back 
JF
True. I’d forgotten that. The “boost” for a newbie is critical.
Don’t do it. They get TENANT rights. and that could become a nightmare.
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As a new host you get a visibility boost. Set to something like 2 day min and 7 day max. Take down a lot of shorter bookings and get your ratings.
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New hosts are TARGETTED by scammers and other undesirables.
@kalarkai This is for the future. There are different philosophies, probably based on the differences in properties. Some think vetting guests is intrusive. The nature of my property (and my initial experience with guests asking the same questions over & over, making the same assumptions over & over, & failing to read my listing description over & over) require that I send each and every inquirer AND reservation request a paragraph with three or four questions. It depends if they have given me any information up front. It saves us both time making sure we’re a good fit and I tell them so. No one has ever objected. Teenagers that want to party on the beach don’t usually get back to me, though.
Really? I don’t recall ever reading another host saying that vetting in general is intrusive.
It’s more a matter, it seems to me, of how one vets. Which for sure depends on location and the nature of the listing.
It would be silly, for instance, for me to ask a guest what brings them to the area, because I live in a beach destination tourist town- everyone basically comes for the same reasons- to escape the cold and relax at the beach.
But that might be a totally appropriate question for a host who lives in London and gets a 1 week booking- is this person coming on holiday to sight-see, coming to attend a conference, or are they going to be lounging around your home-share all day, playing video games and getting on your nerves.
And a host like KKC, who I gather gets a lot of last minute, 1 night bookings, because she lives just off the interstate in an area where there aren’t many places to stay, might not need to ask those guests anything. If someone just needs a place overnight to shower, heat up some take-out or whip up a simple meal and go to sleep, getting back on the road the next morning, they don’t really require much as far as vetting.
Vetting, for me, is about exchanging a few messages with a guest to get a sense of who I am dealing with. As a home-sharer, if a guest sends chatty messages, asks if I need anything from Canada or the US that they could bring down with them, I’m prepared for a friendly, sociable guest. If they just answer briefly, I know they may be a more private, not super sociable person who I probably won’t see much of.
Actual vetting questions for me are to determine whether they read the listing description and realize exactly what they have requested to book. I.e. 20 minute walk to the beach and town, and that they’re aware that the private room is only suitable for one guest.
A guest with nothing to hide will not be offended. That said, if they take offense, you may not want to accept the booking.
@muddy Oh, yes, I have read on this site, several times, where hosts hold the view that vetting is intrusive and, in some cases, just plain unnecessary! Several were IB enthusiasts who have had long and profitable experiences & their method works for them like a well-oiled machine. A few were quite judgemental about it, which I thought shortsighted of them.
You would think, as I am near many tourist attractions and within walking distance of the beach, I can assume the nature and intentions of my guests, but no. I am quite often surprised by the diversity. The giants on the 15 member professional flag football team never saw the beach. They were thrilled with the wildlife in the backyard, though, and needed extra bug spray.
One thing this IB enthusiast dislikes about the concept of vetting is the suspicion of unjust discrimination. And as someone who was once declined by a host for dates that were clearly open on the calendar, but told only “not available,” I always use the IB filter first when searching. And I’ve said elsewhere that all humans have biases, some we are aware of, some we are not.
@KKC of course I have no way of knowing what happened in your case. I do know that the nutroll that I have to go through with my own calendar, where I try to block off certain dates for my own use or for a direct booking but do not trust the OTA blocking method (it has unblocked itself without notice resulting in double bookings, called a “glitch” by customer support) has resulted in dates which appear on my calendar as available when they are not. If you try to book them they should return impossible to meet parameters (that’s my plan, anyway). I hate it, but it works.
This.
Nuff said. Takes the whole unconscious bias out of the game.
Heads on beds and all that.
JF