Request to book with wrong number of guests

[adrienne12]

@muddy

You can decline if they don’t change it or cancel. Or try to get in touch with Airbnb again to say the guest is ignoring doing either, so to please void the request so you don’t have to damage your acceptance rate. That’s all that will happen- declines lower your acceptance rate. Not really a big deal.

It is a big deal. they want you to accept 88% of requests no matter what. You can send him a special offer that corresponds to the price he should be paying. If he doesnt accept that you are all good. Airbnb wont hold it against you and the acceptance rate will not be affected.

[Hampton]

That’s too funny! We are just blessed to be in a good location for North South traffic from Florida to the rest of the country! We get a lot of one night bookings as a result.

[muddy]

Yes, I’m aware of the target Acceptance Rate. But I’ve also read host posts that say that their acceptance rate dropped below that and nothing happened. Even if you get a warning, it’s just a warning, action doesn’t necessarily follow.
Of course, if you can use other methods to avoid having to decline, that’s preferrable.

[Robin]

Do you know for certainty that it does not drop your property down in the search engine? I have 2 properties and one of them is very high in the acceptance rate, it’s a large rural cabin in MN, my other one is a small 4 person near the beach house in AL, there are a lot of festivals near the beach and on in particular draws the 18-21 crowd, (it cancelled du me to COVID) but from January to early March I had about 10 requests for that property from kids that were under my age requirement of 21 and even a father that wanted to rent it for his daughter and 3 friends, it resulted in me having a horrible decline rate on that home, and I can’t even find it in Airbnb at times when I do a search as a traveler, where as my other property is near the top and I have never had an actual decline on that one.

[muddy]

No, I don’t know that for certain, at all. There are so many factors that go into the search algorithms, and Airbnb is not forthcoming about it, that it’s anyone’s guess. I’ve heard that changing little things on your listing, like some wording, or blocking and then unblocking dates, i.e. making your listing look active to the computer bot, will pull your ranking up, but I’ve never found that to be true. And I’ve never had to decline a reservation, so haven’t been able to check what that does to my ranking. Blocking my calendar for a month while I take my summer holiday definitely seemed to drop the ranking.