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Er, that is ONE listing in ONE home in ONE area. Please understand that this is an international forum and what might have happened to you ONE time in ONE area does not scale up to ‘hardly anyone’.
Generalizations like you are making do not add to the conversation.
This does NOT translate into ‘hardly anyone does this’. It translates to me as a guest who is going to be trouble - starting with bringing a pet to my home when it is clear that I do not allow. Please take some time on this forum to see how poor guest behavior makes our lives difficult…
You’re right though, @JJD . This is the kind of thing that makes Air time consuming to book. I was comparing about 5 listings and I just wasn’t careful enough.
Ummm…I rather know from personal experience how poor guest behavior makes my life difficult… ! 
And you don’t think it’s unnecessarily time consuming for hosts to have to answer questions from guests who won’t take the “time consuming” 1 minute to scroll down to House Rules and read them?
We traveled during the height of the pandemic, but for safety we either stayed at free standing AirBnBs or the occasional motel. Motels seemed safer than hotels because you can enter the room without walking through a lobby.
I have about, oh, maybe 8-10 examples of what I call lax security at AirBnBs in my last couple of years traveling.
So, we got unusually heavy experience staying at AirBnBs compared with our previous traveling. And then about 14 months ago our converted our cottage into an AirBnB instead of a long term rental (LTR).
Ah, but the difference is this: I am the paying customer. The host’s time to run their business is not my problem or concern.
I was busy this morning messaging all the hosts to learn their pet policy details and I overlooked scrolling.
Hosts that don’t Instant Book don’t have to book me, or they can cancel my booking. There’s always somewhere else to stay everywhere that I travel to.
Nope, I am not the problem. I am the customer. I sent out 5 messages today about pet policy and discovered things I needed to know.
In my listing I have all essential house rules incorporated in the main listing information. No one has to hunt. Things like no smoking anywhere and my pet policy.
Now, I also do not allow firearms in my house rules. But I don’t put that in the main listing info because it’s not a big issue for me so long as I don’t find out about it. I feel it offers me liability protection in the event a guest shoots a firearm on the property.
I do like to remind hosts of this very important idea:
It’s called hospitality, not hostility.
Not everyone can or should be an AirBnB host, in my view. And a lot of hosts just get burned out. It’s not an easy job.
I answer questions every week from potential guests who book elsewhere. For example, we have a summer opera company in my town, so for a week or so I was fielding requests from temporary workers, mostly living in Europe, mostly asking for discounts (which I don’t give).
I also get questions about our festivals, if their trailer will fit in our parking space, if their pit bull is OK (yes, and that’s in the listing info), whether there will be snow (I can’t answer that one).
It’s part of the job, folks.
Your ‘unusually heavy experience’ is staying in 10 ‘lax’ airbnbs over a few YEARS? Oh, well, I stand corrected. That certainly scales up to one million + airbnbs. 
It seems to me that whether security can be considered “lax” is dependent on whether heavy security is necessary or not. Staying at a rural property where there is no crime in the neighborhood may have light security, as nothing more is needed. But a listing in the heart of a big city where thieves abound may have much more intense security, or certainly should.
Many listings in the tropics are open-air, there aren’t even any doors to lock. In that case, the host may provide a safe for guest’s valuables, or if they are onsite hosts, offer to lock up passports, money, etc, for the guests in a safe spot.
Sending an Inquiry message isn’t being a paying customer. It’s this sort of attitude that leads hosts to dislike Inquiries- guests wasting hosts’ time asking questions the answers to which can be found in the listing, only never to hear back from them, not even a thank you, let alone being paid for the time taken to respond.
And for only one, if any of those hosts, will you be a paying customer.
I agree with you that I consider answering guests’ questions a part of my job, but I am going to be left with a different feeling about a guest who asks reasonable questions as opposed to one who was too lazy to read the listing info. And I don’t consider a guest reading all the listing info to be “hunting”.
Do you see that YOU are part of the problem that hosts have (and is brought up nearly every day here?? Entitled guests who are happy to ask for information already in the listing take our time and usually have no $$$ result - in your case, hosts had to spend time answering a ‘question’ clearly spelled out in EVERY airbnb listing for no gain.
And then you are ok to make blanket assumptions about airbnbs that host pets.
Playing fast and loose about what is in the listing is the bane of all of us serious hosts.
I always say please, thank you, and have a nice day.
When I go to a clothing store to shop, I am called a customer. When I ask about a sweater I’m interested in, I am the customer. When I learn it has to be dry cleaned and that is not what I want, I walk out the door. And then I am no longer a customer.
Welcome to capitalism.
Not a great analogy- the store salesperson is getting paid the same salary to assist shoppers whether you purchase anything or not.
Do you ask whether it has to be dry-cleaned or do you look on the tag? Most people would check the tag, not ask the salesperson.
This is the very definition of an unsafe airbnb.
My analogy is on point because salespeople at high end retailers, such as Bergdorf in New York City, but also many small boutiques, work on commission. The women and men on this forum who shop expensive places know exactly what I’m talking about. That goes for high end home furnishings as well. The sales rep is basically at your elbow, begging to answer questions.
But you might prefer the real estate agent analogy. You show a lot of property to a lot of people who don’t buy from you, and may decide against buying any property in your area at all.
Another reason for always sending hosts a message before booking, when I am a guest, is to make sure they are communicative hosts. If I didn’t have pets to ask about I’d certainly ask about something else.
Unfortunately, recently I asked an AirBnB host if the oven was working but I neglected to ask her if it was filthy. Which it was. So I didn’t use it.
If a host ignores my platform message there’s a chance they won’t help me out in the event of a mechanical failure, either. Or I might not be able to reach them at all.
Another thing I’ve learned is that some of the hosts on this forum do not travel very much. So they don’t know what’s going on out there beyond their small circle of contacts. They also don’t know what it feels like to be a guest.
Basically, if a host is hostile I really don’t want to stay there. And I don’t have to.
Finally, I am aware that some people host AirBnB only because if they didn’t, they’d lose their house to mortgage or tax foreclosure. I met a bunch of hosts at a local party last fall, and I met several people there who told me they would not do AIrBnB if they were not so desperate for the money. Taxes are high, prices in my town have skyrocketed, really, over the last 2 years or so.
Such hosts can still be wonderful hosts, I believe. But hosts who are of necessity can also become resentful and jealous. As a guest I don’t want negative vibes from a host–or a hotel manager, for that matter. But the latter problem is extremely rare in my experience. I used to travel all the time for work, and right now I can’t think of a single case of nasty or neglectful hotel/motel management.
This is what happens on a booking site.
Nobody is a customer / guest until they book.
I can certainly understand guests wanting to feel out a host by sending an inquiry to see if they get a prompt, on-point response, which is why I’m not one of those hosts who resent reasonable inquiries.
But it also isn’t necessary to ask something that is already mentioned in the listing info to establish that a host is someone you feel comfortable booking with. I get a very different sense of a guest who asks “I see that it’s a 20 minute walk to the beach from your place- is it a safe area for a woman to walk alone?” as opposed to “Is your place really only for 1guest?” (My listing title includes “For solo travelers”.)
TL;DR. I just scrolled. It seems like this thread said you have to read, but also scroll. And yes, I am literally LOL’ing at myself.
In seriousness, a real pet peeve of mine is that hosts bury critical information in the rules and only in the rules (like what the pet fee/donation is) and that Airbnb then buries the rules in tiny print that you can’t even see until you are ready to reserve. Then on top of that one must click again and scroll to read all the rules.
There are two reasons I continue to stick with booking airbnbs instead of easy to book hotels. They are consistently half as expensive as the class of hotels I stay in and I prefer to put more of my money into the pockets of people like me instead of corporate hands. But finding good ones can be a real pain at times.
Remember when Airbnb used to have the House Rules section up near the top of the listing info? I don’t think it’s fair to characterize hosts as “burying” info in the House Rules section. They are just putting the rules in the section where they are meant to be. It’s Airbnb that moved them down to the very bottom of the listing page, requiring scrolling all the way down, and then clicking through to actually read them.
Yes.
Anyone who has been here more than a minute knows that if it’s important it has to be in the House Rules (so we can pretend Airbnb will back us up) and in multiple other places including messages sent after booking.