When we purchased our property it had ridiculously good reviews on VRBO and we decided to keep the property on there. I exclusively use Airbnb for my other STR, but recently got my first “inquiry” on VRBO.
The person has (apparently) just joined this year and is requesting to stay 2 weeks. He only made an inquiry if xyz “dates were available”. I confirmed they were. Should I send him a pre approval or wait for him to request to stay?
Thanks
It is more likely than not a scam. When they ask is it available, for a longer booking and the calendar shows it is available why are they asking? Because it is a scam. This happens a lot on vrbo
I would just answer no it is not available (because I am certain it is fake) but if you engage be careful. The next message will be about their employer paying by check…
RR
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We’re new on VRBO as well and we do not allow direct bookings there. Can I assume that we’re ‘safe’ if we go through the regular inquiry approval and have the guest pay VRBO as it should be?
I guess it would be obviously a scam if they start asking about paying outside on VRBO or any platform for that matter…
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I can 100% confidently say that it’s a scam…very common on VRBO. I usually respond with one word like “ok” or “hello” to satisfy the response metric and then don’t waste another second on it. I dreaded receiving booking inquiries because you have to answer them within an hour or get penalized though almost all the time they are fake and end up with no booking.
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I reply with one word. No
RR
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I joined VRBO for a short while. One of the first messages was from someone wondering if they could book for a month, weren’t sure of the dates and could they send me a check from their employer.
Didn’t accept it and later delisted on VRBO. Never had it happen on Air.
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It does happen on Airbnb also, although I’ve never gotten any scam inquiries. Just the occasional guest trying to get me to communicate off-platform so they can avoid paying taxes and fees.
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I’ve never used VRBO but got that same scam you’re quoting 10 or 15 times on ABB. It was all in a short time too, like some kind of scam blitz attack lol.
Thanks. This was my first thought… why are you asking… you see the dates. He ended up not replying back & I’m relieved.
I didn’t realize vrbo was known for scams, appreciate the heads up.
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Vrbo isn’t “known” for scams. They just don’t control things as much as AirBnB.
They also don’t override your policies as much as AirBnB. For instance, I don’t live in dread of the internet going out island-wide when I have Vrbo guests like I do when I have AirBnB guests. Vrbo won’t step in and refund hundreds of dollars a night like AirBnB reported will, just because we didn’t have internet.
We get nearly 50% of our business from legitimate Vrbo bookings. We have a real rental contract that we require guests to sign on Vrbo, too, not just house rules that no one reads.
Well, it happened this morning… the “I can only pay by check” message came through. I simply said no, thanks” & reported as spam. I would’ve never accepted, but I was glad you all gave me a bit of warning. Thanks again!
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By the way, there is no value in sending a preapproval on Vrbo. I’ve heard that if the guest does not book after you preapprove them, it gets counted as a “decline” on your part and hurts your ranking. (I don’t know for sure - we use IB.) If you are willing to accept a booking from that guest and for those dates, I recommend you just say that in your reply and let them send a RTB.
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Thanks. I have basically zero experience with VRBO, so I’m happy to have the info.
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I’m also new to VRBO and we also want to screen our potential guests so no instant booking activated.
Could you kindly explain how to proceed in order to avoid getting dinged by VRBO - even if it’s the guest who decides not to book without any fault on our side?
As far as I understood a guest can contact us to ask for availability (which is ridiculous based on the calendar that they can see). But once they send us such a message, we would have the option to pre-approve the guest? And that’s something we should avoid?
Because if they really wanted to book they would have to send us a “Request to book” (I assume that’s what RTB stands for) which we then can further communicate with the guest and decide to accept or decline? But would this also count against us if we decline at that point?
So many questions, but since we never had a booking there, I’m not sure how it works exactly.
Easy - if you get an inquiry of any sort, just respond to it. DON’T preapprove it. Preapproval was developed to allow that guest to instant book those dates instead of sending in a request. It’s very little difference to the guest except they know you won’t turn them down. So if you have enough information about the guest to approve them if they did request to book (yes, RTB), just tell them that you will approve their request if they put one in.
Yes, declines count against you. You don’t need to decline an inquiry (I’m not sure that is even an option). My advice is that you call Vrbo customer service (CS) if you get an RTB that you will turn down for violating a house rule and ask the Vrbo representative to cancel it penalty-free.
Vrbo is not all that different from AirBnB. You get rewarded for accepting bookings and getting good reviews. You get penalized for turning down suitable bookings and for bad reviews. And you get financially penalized for cancelling bookings unless you can show AirBnB/Vrbo that you had a really good reason to do that.
Oh man, I must be blind…
Last night we got our first RTB (my French email title was: “Demande de réservation”) so I assume it was an RTB.
We opted out for IB in order to vet our guests and to be able to communicate with them PRIOR to booking. In this RTB I couldn’t find any such option to read what the guest wrote in his request. Only because of the modification of the RTB a chat window opened and I was then able to chat to the guest and see that they actually sent us an initital message which VRBO didn’t show us in the RTB in their app. It was so frustrating.
Now, since I responded to the RTB (by making changes to the dates) I noticed that now a ‘Pre-approval timer’ was running on top of the chat window. So, apparently just by responding to an RTB I basically approved them?!?!?
This is so confusing and lead to the guest being (understandably) upset since we wouldn’t accommodate them for the dates they asked for. I didn’t decline the RTB but the guest won’t be booking - so I can assume that this will still count against me?
I asked this in my post today if the RTBs on VRBO do not show the initial message from the guest as I couldn’t find it anywhere in my app (didn’t check on PC). I would have expected that I can chat with the guest before approving the RTB, so maybe I just overlooked it somewhere?!?
I don’t use RTB, so I can’t answer most of your questions. Hopefully someone else can. Be sure to read the help articles on the Vrbo site, and joining a Facebook group specific to Vrbo owners is useful, too, for these kind of questions.
There’s a timer on the RTB - you need to approve or decline, get the guest to cancel their request, or call CS and have them cancel it, within 24 hours.
There’s also a timer on an inquiry. Vrbo will hide your listing if you don’t respond (you don’t have to preapprove, just respond) in 24 hours - they assume you are unavailable. You have to call CS to have it shown again.
But why weren’t you able to accommodate them for their dates?
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During peak season we increase the minimum stay duration to 7 days. These guests wanted 3 days and we thought that these 3 days could potentially block someone else who is looking for a week or significantly longer. We already had companies putting their workers in our studio for 6 weeks and this is also the busy season for local construction.
If your calendar is configured correctly for the 7-night minimum, then they should not have been able to RTB for a shorter length of time. If they RTB’d for a week, but then asked you to shorten the dates, you should ask the guest to cancel their RTB or you can call Vrbo to have Vrbo cancel the RTB on the guest’s behalf.
No, it was my mistake. In general we allow 3 day stays. Only for peak season we increase it to 7 which we didn’t configure in the VRBO calendar settings. As to my knowledge, such temporary changes of minimum stay lengths, require calendar adjustments on ALL platforms and not just one which syncs to all other platforms. Please correct me if I’m wrong, since in that case VRBO should not have accepted a 3 day booking request as we set up the 7 days on Airbnb and BDC before.