Third-party bookings

They will often request to book active available dates—for example, Aug 15-18–and and say: We are thinking of booking your place in November or December… we’re not sure yet… but we wanted to know if we could bring our dog… it’s a service dog…’

That’s an example of the kind of booking request I get—at least 2-3 times a quarter. If I ask them to decline/retract their request, I’ll wait about an hour. If they don’t decline it within that time, I’ve found that they’re probably not going to bother following up with it. In this case, I decline because if I wait too long or for the 24 hours to lapse, it will affect my response rate which affects superhost status—whereas acceptance rate doesn’t affect superhost status - although it can affect other things (at least according to the link I had posted). There might be more wiggle room with acceptance rate—given that when you do decline a request, Airbnb asks you to specify why. Does anyone know if the reasons specified for the decline affect the weight assigned to it?

I’m concerned with the impacts of being able to decline because this is property that the host owns and is responsible for. If a host gets a few requests that they don’t feel comfortable with or the guest’s communications during the booking request suggest that they haven’t read the house rules or they’re going to be a problem, the host should be able to decline the request without taking any negative hits on their rating.

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No, it doesn’t.

You already responded.

By declining, I think you’ve hurt your acceptance rate.

Yes, that’s what I meant, that guests can only put in available dates to send a request, but can ask for anything in the actual message. And if you don’t want your calendar blocked by a requester not responding in a timely manner, or withdrawing the request, then you do have to decline the request.

Wrong- if you wait, unless the 24 hours has lapsed, it doesn’t affect your response rate. Response rate is only affected if you don’t respond to an Inquiry within 24 hrs, or don’t either accept or decline a request within 24 hrs. If you wait 23 hrs, your response rate won’t change. (Where it says on our listings “Host responds within 1 hour” has nothing to do with your actual response rate stat)

And you are correct, that acceptance rate doesn’t count for Superhost. And it doesn’t seem fair for hosts to take an acceptance rate hit when guests request things that we don’t allow.

Of course, you could teach guests a lesson re sending requests for unavailable dates when they do it by inputting available dates on a request (as opposed to in an Inquiry) by accepting, rather than declining, the request, meaning they’ll get charged and booked for the dates they input, rather than the dates they asked for in the message.
But that would be a bit mean-spirited, as I think many guests, especially newbies, just don’t understand how to send an Inquiry and when they should do so.

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