How to stop new cancellation policies, host fee increases and instant book settings?

1

All these things are putting more cost on hosts. How can we hosts all agree to ALL turn off Instant Book and ALL set our refund policies to strict instead?

Right now the new policy has not been initiated yet in the USA, has it? Not sure when it will be either. Does anyone know? What do you all have your settings on now, whats your min/max stay? I am so confused.

2

It was introduced in Australia about a week ago, no really big announcements or anything, I mostly knew what was coming because of the threads. I have always had no Instant Book and strict cancellation policy and from my approx 60 bookings, I am guessing I would have lost about 5 and lost money when they tried to cancel at the last minute and lost their money. ABB always sided with me as their reasons were crap and 3 decided to come anyways. It means people can secure my place 6 months in advance and then if they find a better deal, change their mind or get a last minute hotel 31 days prior they can cancel and I get nothing despite having strict. ABB still gets money and they’ve done nothing compared to the work I often do communicating and securing the booking etc. Most disappointing.

Do I even get to leave a review (I don’t think so) or does the guest get an automated review from ABB ‘xyz cancelled this booking 31 days prior?’ and their scores go down? I hope so! At least thats some disincentive. How do we find this out?

3

Does anyone know with absolute certainty if a host who has NOT yet been forced to use Instant Book–and decides to “test it out”–would in fact be able to go back to NOT using Instant Book?

I’ve been toying with testing it for a week just to see if IB is taking all of our bookings. This is the absolute slowest month we’ve had since we began almost three years ago. We have MAYBE 20% of the bookings we did last year at this time.

:frowning:

4

I’m able to turn it on and off.

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