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But I looked for airline flights last Thursday, but the price was more than $100 more when I went to book them on Saturday. I recalled hearing flight prices were cheaper on weekdays, so I waited until this evening and tried again. The prices were back to the price they were last Thursday.
Not that I encourage hosts to follow @house_plants’ policy, but there’s an old saying “you snooze, you lose”.
I find the recommendations to be too low. What I list on any given day is higher than the recommendations and we still get guests so that’s the deciding factor for me. It’s kind of interesting to see their recommendation, but I ignore it. By the way, one thing that’s worked really well for us. This winter is that I change the title of our Airbnb by adding the phrase winter discount! And we do lower the price is a bit for the winter months. We’ve been fairly steady in terms of guests.
Thank you for that. I just changed our title to incorporate that.
Love it. I could not have explained it better. My five star hospitality is available only to paying guests.
Everybody else is just a data point to help me make more money.
Can you explain your strategy?
You are lucky that you get such interesting inquiries. The ones I get are so boring.
With those kinds of Inquiries (I’ve gotten a few clueless ones, but nothing anywhere near that dumb or entitled), I can see why you’d block the dates.
That sounds about right to me. Because it certainly seems that apart from newbies who can’t IB, IB hosts seem to get a lot of clueless and entitled inquiries and requests.
There is one exception where I get clueless, time-wasting inquiries- unless I have already gotten a desirable booking for those dates, I have blocked the entire week of Semana Santa (Easter break in Latin America for anyone who isn’t aware) before. That’s when hoards descend on my little town for the sole purpose of partying. So the week before, I was getting lots of “So is it really only for one person?” or “I see you only list for 1 guest- my friends can bring air mattresses” or “Do you know of any other places that accept more than 1 guest?” Although I’m sure I would have a full calendar that week, answering all those stupid inquiries , or having them show up with extra guests or trying to cluelessly sneak someone in, just isn’t worth the hassle.
It gets so outrageous here that a woman I know arrived at her rental, that is right on the beach, one Semana Santa, just in time to catch a bunch of people carrying her outdoor sofa that is on the porch, down the steps onto the beach. When she asked them WTF they thought they were doing, they said they just wanted a comfortable place to sit on the beach. As if it was perfectly reasonable to remove furniture from the porch of a private home.
I do not see anything questionably ethical in @house_plants approach. This is a business and HP stated that he treats the guests well and gets good reviews. I agree, who GAF about the ones that do not book as long as those dates get booked? I do not feel like I am an ambassador for Chesky.
I do not hesitate do block dates or raise prices when I get an inquiry that seems off to me. Like HP I have instant book on and prefer people use that. An inquiry to me is a PITA and often comes with requests I do not want to deal with.
The beauty about owning your own business is choosing which customers NOT to deal with IMO.
RR
What no one has mentioned yet (as far as I know - this is a long thread so I might have missed something) is that answering inquiries is a sales opportunity.
Because I use IB I don’t get loads of inquiries but over the years, most have converted to bookings.
Maybe it’s many years working in sales that makes me gleeful when someone enquires giving me an opportunity to do something I don’t normally have the chance to do which is sell.
I never see inquiries as time consuming or a waste of my time because a certain amount of my time, at a fairly high hourly rate I might add, is costed into my annual hosting expenses. It’s part of the job and I’m ‘paid’ for it.
So do I. Just my opinion but some hosts seem to be way too picky. A guest is a guest.
This x 1,000,000.
When I hear of hosts who see inquirys as an interruption of their day, or as an opportunity to vent their hostility, I hope that they are in my competitive area, so I do not need to work hard at it - they hopefully would have made an inquiry to a host who raises the prices or ghosts them. It makes my place so much more attractive to the guest.
Also, I see a long term positive note here as well - if I lose a booking to one of those angry, distrustful, or generally resentful hosts, my place immediately becomes much nicer to the guest who had to deal with a host who sees hosting as a video game that needs to be won. The next time that guest is looking in my area they will have one less property to consider, and if my dialog with them the first time was good, they will look for me.
So true.
And so can folks instant book and then ‘advise’ a host that they want to bring extra folks, checkout late, etc. I think clueless or ‘sneaky’ guests are not automatically shunted by airbnb into the ‘inquiry’ lane.
As I also said, I totally understand blocking the calendar or giving very brief responses to clueless and entitled inquirers.
In my upholstery business, I’ve gotten to the point where I can recognize potential time wasters right off the bat. The types who ask me to come measure up a project, think I can give them an estimate on the spot (I can’t- I have to go home, and work out on graph paper how much fabric I’ll need, according to the size of the pieces I’ll need, as fabric comes in a certain width- you can’t have a seam in the middle of a cushion& it’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle), keep me there asking a million questions, and I can tell from the rest of their furnishings that they go for cheap stuff.
But I still have to deal with them initially like all the rest of the good clients, to do less is just unprofessional. When those types don’t even have the manners to call me back to thank me for my time and say they’re going to hold off for awhile (or whatever excuse they want to give, I really don’t care), if they contact me in the future, I just tell them I’m swamped with work and wouldn’t be able to get to their project for a couple of months.
It just sounded like HP automatically treated all inquirers as undesirable guests, which is just weird to me. Guests are supposed to be able to ask questions before commiting to a booking. To penalize them for doing so seems mean-spirited.
Both of these are inaccurate and accusatory.
Thank goodness I said “some hosts”. 
I’ve only had a few guests who have tried to bring in extra people although if they sneakily bring one in, I tend to turn a blind eye because my business license and my insurance cover me for three people, although I state my max as being two on Airbnb.
Just about all the inquiries I get are things that the potential guest could easily find out from the listing or from Google.
How close is the conference centre, can we walk to the beach, do you have free parking, is the wifi good and so on.
I realise this differs from host to host, from location to location, from guest to guest… but my inquiries are usually pretty general.
Agreed, with the occasional request to book off platform (immediately flagged) or underage request (under 25, nope - if you can’t rent a car in my state you can’t stay at my airbnb).
My interaction with the traveling public is my joy, not my burden. As a retiree, this is my major source for income, and when folks stay with us they are keeping us afloat. I smile every time I get a good review, and those emails saying “ka-ching money”.
Happily, I have not become embittered like the stereotypes of folks of my generation (“Get off my lawn”) and I look at fellow humans as, well, fellow humans and not creatures trying to rob me or kill my spirit.
If an inquiry asks questions that make it obvious that they didn’t bother to read through my listing info, that’s annoying, and a red flag, or at least a pink one, but I never really mind questions about “how far is it to…” or “what’s the best way to get from the airport…”.
Experienced travelers are adept at Googling for info like that, looking at maps, etc, but some people are travelling outside of their known comfort zone for the first time and need a bit of hand-holding and reassurance.
Also because I host solo travelers in a homeshare, they tend to be more cautious and want to make sure it’s a host they feel comfortable with, that it’s a safe area, etc.
All the articles about how dangerous Mexico is make a lot of people wary, thinking they’ll be risking their lives just walking down the street, so in my case, I can understand guests wanting to ask a few questions.
Unlike a lot of other hosts’ experience, at least half of my inquiries go on to book, and have been fine guests.
And I’m so glad that there are Airbnb hosts like you. 
I have a private home airbnb. In my state, there is no law about discrimination based on age in my situation - indeed, after 11 years doing this, I certainly know my local and state codes. But maybe you have not understood or read airbnb’s take on age? Take a moment to read it:
Please do not accuse folks of things you know not. And ‘pissing contests’ on this forum are distractions and not helpful…
Another thing hosts should keep in mind is that just as hosts may beef up their house rules and vetting procedures after having some bad guest experiences, some guests also have encountered bad hosts or listings, and if it didn’t totally put them off ever booking on Airbnb again, they may be much more cautious in the future. Even if a guest is eligible to IB, they might send an inquiry asking some random questions, just as a method of them seeing if the host responds promptly and in what way.
I’ve read posts from single women who booked a private room homeshare with what they thought was a female host, only to find out the host was a weird guy who had used a photo of a female as his profile photo and a female name, and other tales of woe from guests who got broadsided by inaccurate or purposely misrepresented listings. If I were a guest, that would certainly make me much more cautious in the future.