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Here is what I just sent to Airbnb:
Citation
Why am I penalized because a guest does not reply within the time to my own message sent 2 hours after his request of booking?
This is totally unfair and hypocrite.
Should I wait until the 24 hours are going to expire and refuse then?
The blame is obviously on the guest, why am I the one penalized?
Citation
Can you ease my anger and frustration?
I don’t think I can ease anger & frustration but you are not alone.
Something to consider is if the guest doesn’t respond to your request for information before you approve the booking, I think it indicates you can expect a slow response to any communication.
I think most guests do not activate the text messaging and rely on email. As hosts we are held accountable for timely responses so we tend to use the text messaging.
I’m a bit hard nosed about it. I give them almost to the last minute but If they don’t respond within the total 24 hour time, I decline the request with the comment, “I hope you continue considering booking with me. Hosts are held accountable for for response times. Since I haven’t heard from you in xxx hours, I had to assume you were no longer interested in this rental. If you are still interested, let me know.”
Yes, I’ve been warned about almost having too many declines. I asked Airbnb CS to check the threads and they’ve removed my last two declines. I think the key was clearly demonstrating the declines were due to the guests’ lack of responses.
The Airbnb CS reps I’ve worked with tend to be young plus you get more flies with honey than vinegar. Consider what approach will work best for you and keep on renting!!!
I agree completely. I once accepted a first time airbnb user who turned out to have no profile photo (a cartoon graphic). I sent a total of 3 texts within 48 hours requesting a profile pic with no response. I called up CS and was able to decline the reservation without any penalties.
Don’t frustrate yourself expecting Airbnb to protect you or cover you for a dumb guest that won’t respond. Next time this happens, after a few hours without a guest response - send them a Special Offer and increase the rate by 100s of dollars. This will get you off the hook in terms of your response rate. In my experience, 1 out of 10 guest will respond after this - and the ones that do are immediately argumentative after having ignored you for hours. Your not punished at all at this point as the special offer will expire in 24 hours. Thats a good way of declining an inquiry without having it counted against you as a decline.
Was there a reason you didn’t simply decline within the 24 hours time slot, when you hadn’t heard back from the guest. @MyPlacesInHuaHin That’s what I do.
That is genius. I won’t get fooled again (as a band said earlier 
)
Thank you.
Really excellent strategy.
Tid
I got it now: I have been fooled by Airbnb’s verbiage, sneaky verbiage: " Answer within …"
They should say: “Accept or refuse before…”
As the guest was asking questions, I answered, believing that I did the right thing.
Thanks to @sobepuppy, I won’t be fooled again now.
Tid
Strangely this happened to us this weekend for the very first time in nearly 3 years/100 bookings.- - we answered the original request very very quickly and then heard nothing for 24 hours - booking automatically cancelled because no payment made. I then phoned AirBnB Support so that I could block the person - only to be told that I couldn’t because there was no booking reference number.
Yes, but your agenda has not been blocked for the requested period, so no harm done.
actually it was blocked - the guest had messaged me Friday pm to come to stay on Saturday - by the time the cancellation took place it was 3pm Saturday afternoon and too late for another guest to book