So here’s an interesting one. I have it set up to allow 1 day prep time before and after a booking for cleaning. There is a guest coming on August 1st for one night, so the 31st and the 2nd were blocked off. The largest convention of the year is in town the 3rd through the 6th. I wanted to make my listing available for the 2nd to catch people coming into town the night before the convention. Demand is high that night and I can turn and burn the cleaning. So I go into my calendar and mark that day as available. As my listing is new, it’s competitively priced for the area. No bookings or even bites all week for that week… So I go in and do an availability search. If I include the 2nd in the date range, my listing doesn’t come up. If I change it to the 3rd to the 6th, bam… There I am, top of the listings… WTH? So I get on the phone to AirBNB. The rep gets on the phone and I explain what I’m seeing… She says that even though I manually set the date as available, the system still sees that I want a day before and a day after and blocks it off. Even though it actually is shown as available on the hosting availability calendar… Doesn’t make sense at all to me… She suggests taking off the prep time and see if it shows as available then… So I try, and bam, there I am at the top of the search results… Go figure… Not very intuitive… Since I’m screening all bookings for now, I can make sure that I have ample cleaning time before I book something.
That part definitely sounds like a bug. It’s actively misleading. I’d definitely point that out to Airbnb, but don’t hold your breath expecting them to fix it. Based on my own experience, and other people’s reports, their platform is fairly bugridden. I counsel caution. Checking that your listing can be searched for is a good preemptive step.
Sorry but the prep time overrides the availability. You will have to choose what works best for you but you can’t have it both ways. I would take off the prep time blocking automatically and just manually block those days for each booking where it’s necessary. That’s what I do. Sometimes I just want the day before and sometimes the day after.
Sometimes I just jack up the price on the day after to make it more worth my while to bust my @$$ getting the room ready. Only a couple of bookings on those days but hey…
I don’t leave a day between bookings for prep time but I do increase the price at either end (the day before the booking and the checkout night). That way, I don’t mind if people book on ‘prep days’ because I’ve added $30 or so to that night’s rental fee. It works well.
OMG…this exact thing just happened to me last night! I felt robbed! lol.
I like to be booked full time. As some of you know my turnover time is rather quick compared to most. Haha
Disable the gap days temporarily and handle them manually until you are past this period of preferred booking.
Agreed, I’d also increase my minimum stay if you are going to have day before and after prep days blocked off otherwise you are potentially (if you have many single night requests) only getting one nights income for 3 nights blocked off