Is there an advantage for the host to ignore a booking request? Does it go against the host more to let the request expire or to decline it?
If you fail to either accept or decline a booking request within 24 hours, your response rate will be affected, and response rate is one of the criteria for Superhost.
If you decline a request, your Acceptance rate is affected, which does not factor into Superhost.
And I am not at all sure about this, but I had read that ignoring a Request is counted as a decline.
Why would you ignore a request? That seems like unethical hosting practice.
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Exactly why would you ignore a request? I had someone ignore the request and it expired. It made me wonder if there was some advantage in doing that.
No advantage that I can think of. If I were a guest, it would just make me think the host was flakey. And that kind of thing also makes guests never want to book a listing that doesn’t allow IB. Seems really rude to leave a guest hanging for 24 hrs waiting for the host to either accept or decline, or at least answer.
Airbnb at one point years ago stopped sending me alerts. So I missed a booking request, not seeing it until 25 hours after the guest sent it. I immediately responded to her, apologizing and explaining what had happened, and she did go on to book.
It took Airbnb a month to get the alert glitch fixed, and in the meantime, I had to check my account 2 or 3 times a day to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. And they lowered my Response Rate, even though it was their tech glitch that caused me to miss it.
So it is possible that if a request goes unresponded to, it isn’t that the host has ignored it, but that there is an Airbnb tech glitch, which seem to happen a fair amount.