Review your Instant Book Setting - - how many think this is trustworthy?

Review your Instant Book settings

As part of Airbnb’s latest release, we announced that we are expanding identity verification to all booking guests traveling to the top 35 countries and regions on Airbnb.

With this update, we’ve made some adjustments to Instant Book settings. Please review the following changes that apply to your listing(s).

  • In the top 35 countries/regions on Airbnb, the “government-ID required” option has been replaced with a new multi-step identity verification process.

The link for more info doesn’t provide any info that provides me with confidence/

  • The “Host recommendation required” option has been updated to “good track record,” which only allows guests to book a stay if they’ve had no incidents or negative reviews.

Hasn’t this always been the case?

  • The “pre-booking message required” option has been removed. If you’d like to continue to ask your guest questions at the time of booking, you can use the [scheduled message]

OK - great - another thing that we need to do ourselves. I could barely get guests to send in info and part of my Instant book was that they agreed to my message.

Why o why are they making it harder to host, feel secure with the guests staying…

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@Lynick4442 Just got this mealy mouthed message and was about to post it, but you beat me.

This is why I’m now off IB.

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Here’s what I don’t understand: what is a negative review in ABB’s opinion? I am hesitant to book anyone with four stars and neutral comments (“guest stayed here”), but ABB will not view that review as negative.

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1 star? Trashed the place but stopped short of burning it down? As usual, Airbnb is the master of ambiguity and lack of explanations, so they can go ahead and do whatever they want.

It would now seem to be even more important for hosts not to shy away from giving honest, negative reviews if that’s what the guest deserves. No more “neutral” comments.

Would love to see the stats on how many hosts have or will now turn off IB, but of course Airbnb will never publish that info.

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Here’s the thing, they say they MAY ask guests to provide…
There is nothing clear in what they’ve written.

I’m pretty convinced they’re trying to drive older hosts away. Newbies will be clueless as to how things used to function and will accept it until they start running into problems.

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Because they basically want anyone to be able to book anything and they don’t give a da&n about the hosts.

Case in point, I got IB-ed by a guy with 2 stays but no reviews. He was a reverend, maybe that’s why he didn’t get reviewed. Rather than saying something bad about his stays the hosts decided not to review him, so they won’t upset the man in the sky or something.

So before these changes the requirement for IB were to have excellent reviews from hosts. Now they downgraded this requirement to “if they didn’t break any rules”. I don’t even know what this means. Well, this change assumes people with zero reviews are good guests.

So this guy IB me and then he asks if I rent by the hour. Woa, reverend, I am not a hotel. I declined and called CS and cancel his stay on the grounds that I wasn’t comfortable with this stay.
I took off my IB requirements. I have to approve guests from now on.

Anyway, the way things are going they’ll take away the ability to cancel if you’re uncomfortable. They’ll make it harder and harder… I switched to hosting trav nurses primarily and ABB only in-between them.

That is ridiculous.

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I only saw one option:

  • The “Host recommendation required” option has been updated to “good track record,” which only allows guests to book a stay if they’ve had no incidents or negative reviews.
    where is this one:
  • In the top 35 countries/regions on Airbnb, the “government-ID required” option has been replaced with a new multi-step identity verification process.
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Just wait. My prediction is that the removal of requirements to IB will cause tons of hosts to turn off IB, and Airbnb’s response to that will be to eliminate Request to Book, and only offer IB. Just a matter of time.

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I have turned instant book off as I cannot be filtered for Adults and children over 12.
At least on b.com, if they are honest in the guest count / make up- my listings don’t appear in the available properties

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The solution? Manually approve all booking requests.

Switching off instant book was one of the best decision I ever made.

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I turned off IB last night.

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Having IB places you higher in searches etc. Be aware…

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I just talked to Airbnb CS, this guy told me, new guest can instant book our homes. Guests who had previous hosts reviewed as ‘Not recommended to other hosts’ can instant book our homes as long as hosts didn’t report an incidents. That’s a stupid update that Airbnb provided to all the hosts.

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I bet your prediction is spot on.

Chesky is trying to make AirBnB more like the hotel business model for guests. We all know what the problem is with that; these are individual homes, not cookie cutter hotels.

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Dropping one’s price to Airbnb’s absurd price tips, offering same-day bookings, offering discounts, allowing pets, and lots of things Airbnb wants hosts to do leads to higher search rankings, but that doesn’t mean they are a good idea.

If Airbnb has eliminated all the requirements hosts could list to IB, and “would not welcome back” doesn’t result in being considered an negative review (it is now sounding like hosts need to contact Airbnb to report any “incident” in order for that guest to be disallowed from IBing), then high search ranking just means that lazy newbies who don’t bother to read the listing info, and guests who don’t want hosts to be able to read their bad reviews if they send a request, will be more likely to see your listing first and IB it.

@Keugenia Honestly, I think that Chesky and crew are too clueless and arrogant to anticipate how many hosts will drop IB due to their guest-pandering “updates”. Certainly they have seemed unable to anticipate how their supposed past (dis)improvements negatively affect and lead to disenfranchising their hosts.

So I don’t think this was a calculated move to get hosts to abandon IB, so they could then make it mandatory, but I do think that IB only will be an inevitable change at some point.

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Oh, and BTW, folks, guests can now see the star ratings you have given them. I predict a plethora of nasty messages to hosts from guests who you have given low stars to, as well as guests asking Airbnb to remove their positive review of their stay if they find the host has downrated them.

Also hosts who tend to shy away from leaving negative comments, and leave neutral written reviews, but downrate on stars to warn other hosts, will now either give undeserved high ratings or decline to review at all if the guest can now see the star ratings they were given.

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So we are now further unprotected and have no incentive to protect the following host at all……

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I agree with the “further unprotected” part, but the incentive to leave honest reviews is the same as always- to warn other hosts so bad guests don’t keep getting passed around making hosts’ lives miserable.

However, guests being privy to seeing their star ratings will cause a lot of hosts to consider the damage an honest review could do to their listing (nasty messages from guests, guests having Airbnb remove their positive reviews and ratings, guests seeking revenge by reporting some bogus issue that gets the guest refunded and the listing suspended) to outweigh the value of warning fellow hosts. It encourages the “every man for himself” attitude", as opposed to “we’re all in this together” community spirit.

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yet another way ABB has screwed up the review system. You can’t really screen guests based on reviews. Such a useless system.

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what??? seriously? oh that is NOT good news.

edit: oh i see someone has asked about this in the CC, and Jenny has trotted out the usual “pls be patient while we wait for feedback”

and actually I asked for clarification on this on Monday, bc the review process does tell us that guests will see what we did.