I got a notice that Airbnb messaging now has “read receipt” so we can tell if the guest (or potential guest) has read the message, but I cannot find any details in the knowledge base. Does anyone have details (or a link).?
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I didn’t get that notification! Can you share with us the message you received? This is intriguing. I did an online search and I can see several places (the Airbnb community forum, Reddit, and here) where people were asking for that option.
In most social media that has the read receipt, there are also ways to opt out of it (fair enough since it can be creepy).
For sure, I want to know if this is now applying to everyone, because sometimes I might not respond to a message on Airbnb because I’m in the middle of something, but we all now how people get upset to be left “on read” so now I’ll have to be careful to not read a message until I have time to reply!
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Where did you get this notice- by email?
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The message was a pop-up that appeared a couple of times when I logged in to my inbox in my windows web browser. No permanent record.
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I don’t have a record of the notificATION – it was a pop-up that appeared a couple of times when I logged in to my inbox in my windows web browser.
Ah. I haven’t gotten that. I might have pop-ups blocked on my Chrome browser though, I’ll have to check.
You can turn it off under Settings - Privacy and Sharing - Sharing - Read Receipts 
I just did
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Why would you want to turn it off? It seems quite useful to me to know whether a guest has read a message you sent them. Otherwise when a guest doesn’t respond, you have no way of knowing if they read the message yet, are just not bothering to respond, or maybe don’t have their notifications turned on. And if a guest just ignores your messages, and then claims they never saw them, you can tell if they are lying or not.
@lisanddavid What’s creepy about it?
Turning off read receipts as a host in my settings only means that guests can’t see whether I’ve read their messages. I can still see whether they’ve read mine, unless they adjust their read receipt
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Ah, I see. Well, I can’t really think of a reason I wouldn’t want guests to know I had read their message.
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Well, I’m not someone who expects instant answers to messages, unless it’s something urgent, because peope have lives and may be busy, and if guests expect instant responses, as if hosts don’t have lives, that’s just too bad.
I turn off my phone ringer when I go to bed at night and couldn’t care less if a guest sends a request at 2am- I’ll respond when I get up in the morning. A guest who expects a response to a request or inquiry when it’s the middle of the night in the host’s time zone isn’t a guest I care about losing a booking from.
And I’ve never lost a potential guest or had them be upset because it took me a few hours to respond if I was busy or asleep.
If I would appreciate being able to see if a guest has read my message, it seems rather unfair to not offer them the same.
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