Instant booking scam terms

It’s a big world. You don’t like Airbnb. You don’t like Homeaway Currently I think they are the platforms with the most exposure.

Hand it over to a rental company and you don’t have to deal with any of it. Just collect the money and keep the property maintained. You won’t net as much cash but you won’t have the frustration

Don’t like instant book?—don’t offer it. I’ve used it for 2 or 3 years. I’ve a couple of recent odd events so I think I’m dropping it. I think like KkC in my case it won’t make a lot of difference.

Was it within 24 hours of booking. I believe that is a requirement of the 3 per year.

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Even though I use IB I do have restrictions on my home. Govt ID and profile pic required. Our whole home location has no same day IB although I will still get the occasional request which I evaluate very closely. Also I have my cut off to book at 6pm for same day arrivals, of course they can always request it. The Govt ID and profile pic renders me with requests instead of actual IB bookings.

Been getting a good amount of bookings without IB. We tried IB to see the difference. Got a couple short term 2 night bookings and 2 we chose to cancel. Having super-host 4.9 rating, tons of glowing reviews, counts way more than IB. I set all the restrictions on IB and it failed, a guest with no reviews was able to IB and wanted to host a party/event, nope.

Annet3176 I am the management/rental company for my Aunt and my own Airbnb, it’s a cool gig I can do from anywhere and we make a good team. I’m just trying to improve the experience for myself and other hosts, fix the system like a technician. It’s apparent that’s it’s near impossible to get a straight answer from Airbnb so we will adapt our business by shunting IB for the time being and trying to get it fixed. Homeway provides only about 10% of our bookings and we prefer to keep it that way as they charge so much more in fees.

I do know that last year I had my settings at no children and had an IB book with a child. This year I had a similar booking and ABB sent thru a booking request instead of a actual bookings. So maybe they have updated the settings?

Yes, it was within 5 minutes of the booking each time I cancelled. Airbnb is just shady how they make you go through support to cancel. They are actually chatting with me today in FB messenger to look into this, I will update the results here.

There isn’t a limit of three cancellations limit under IB if you meet their criteria for an IB cancellation. Hasn’t been for at least a year. Maybe 2.

Worth you having a re-read of the IB conditions for hosts on Airbnb Help Centre @Aje.

And yes if there is a technical error where Airbnb lets a guest book with no reviews, when you have it set to only accept guests with reviews under IB, then you call them up and ask them to cancel.

I completely agree with you, there should be clear instructions, complete and no interpretation possible.

There are clear instructions:

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2022/how-do-penalty-free-cancellations-work-for-instant-book-hosts

You can cancel three times per year without reference to customer support on the basis of “not being comfortable”, after three times you need to contact customer support to cancel. Pretty clear to me.

JF

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JohnF thanks for posting that link, I did see it. However if you TRY to cancel for ANY reason, including I’m uncomfortable, you still get a threatening warning about losing Superhost status for one year. THIS is the BUG and issue I’m upset about. It’s contradicting. This morning I get another reply from support, at least they admit they have issues with IB, but don’t offer much hope other than “keep giving us feedback so we can improve our shitty system”.

Hi Aje, this is Helen again from Airbnb. I apologized for the late response. I understand your concern on the cancellation under the instant book. Airbnb is being a bit strict now when it comes to cancellation because there are some hosts who abused the free cancellation which lead to a great loss of Airbnb. But nothing to worry about Aje, even though we have been strict when it comes to cancellation, we can still provide you a free cancellation, if both parties agrees to cancel the reservation and if you have an extenuating circumstance. I know that you are concern about your Superhost status and you don’t want it to be affected if you are going to cancel a reservation because you are not comfortable with the guest or if you have an emergency, but we are always right here to support you with that. Right now, we are still on the process in making our platform better and studying some policies that will be fair for both guest and host and we really appreciate if you will give us some suggestion, we can have a better solution if we will know what our users thinking about us. To give us some feedback, you can go to this link: Omitted per forum rules.

This is complete BS, they expect hosts to get guests to mutually agree to cancel as our first option! Bottom line, Instant booking sucks for hosts now.

that’s because people don;t read the restrictions. also the searches on ABB probably don’t take into consideration the restrictions.

In my experience i played with IB and no IB but since i wasnt a superhost at that time and i didnt have many reviews, switching IB off put me like at the bottom of searches. plus a gazillion emails to turn IB back on.

so i turned it back on and selected all available conditions, good reviews from other hosts, id etc, etc, etc. i have 5 conditions for IB to happen. I got a couple of bad apples, where obviously previous hosts gave 5 star review although the guest did not deserve them but mostly good and very good people.

Also I want to add that no matter how horrible the cancellation process here booking.com financially penalize hosts for cancellation. So, in my experience, as a new host there, my listing was up for like half a day until I spoke with someone on the phone and she confirmed that they don;t collect and remit payment as ABB and that is my responsibility to collect payments and pay taxes. so I asked her to disable my account until they fix this. but in that morning a chinese woman has booked me. so, i sent her a messgae and ask her to cancel and I explained the circumstances. she then called the customer service and cancels and they fined me 100$ for not being able to host her!!! It didn’t matter that I called CS again and complained that this isn’t fair because they don’t advertise on their website they don’t collect the money and pay no tax so it wasn’t my fault of not being able to receive her. they said it’s their policy once your listing is up you have to be ready to host!!! so the fine stays. I cancel my account and paid nothing! so compared to that ABB are far better. AT least they allow some.

Yes. Booking.com, you pretty much take all who come. They can bring a lot more bookings esp international.

On the other hand, they are a lot less controlling than airbnb with things like extenuating circumstances

Some people just price higher on that platform to reflect the risk

A guest with no reviews can book if they were part of a party with a positive review.

Have to say @Aje , I have never had any problems with IB’s and cancellations to date. Didn’t have to have both parties agree.

As we often say on here. There is little consistency.

Have asked them to cancel three bookings since November, which they have done, without issue.

Airbnb admits to me they had issues with hosts cancelling often on IB’s so they made it harder to cancel. For our business we prefer choosing who we want and there’s no shortage of business.

Hello and welcome to the forum @Aje, I live in the house where I host, so instant book is not something I want or need, but you too can choose to not use the instant book system.

You may need to weigh the advantages of Superhost status and the need to control how you use your space.

That said, the Airbnb support is notoriously annoying, but you need to figure out if this is something you may need to factor into your hosting if you want to use instant book.

We all have a love-hate relationship with the support representatives, but this forum is a good place to vent, figure out what you intend to do, and have some real psychological support behind you when you do.

Good luck with the hosting

Thanks Crycepaul, I’m doing much better now after venting and getting replies from support acknowledging their flaws, although they still can’t seem to figure out how the first IB with no reviews happened. I’ve moved on, and business is flowing for months ahead, without IB.

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It’s a bug in their software @aje. That’s why the CS didn’t know what to tell you how it happened.

One time, for example I was looking on the map to see how many hosts were in my area and one of them was actually a listing from Vientam or something… the platform is buggy. things will happen. I block some days on the phone app for personal purposes and when I go home and look it up on my laptop, someone booked them because they were never blocked…