Check your AirBnB Settings

[Michael Stokes]

Hi everyone, just wanted to share an AirBnB experience I had this evening with the group in case this happens to anyone else.  I logged in to my AirBnB dashboard tonight and saw a new section that said "New! Ways to get more bookings as travel changes".  I was curious so I clicked on it and found recommendations about relaxing cancellation policy, shorter (1 night bookings) etc., pretty much exactly what you would expect.  What I did not expect was a recommendation to turn on instant booking, because I have had that on since day 1.  

When I saw that recommendation I went into the normal booking settings and not only was it now set to off, it also lost the requirements I had set to allow someone to instant book.  I turned everything back on but wanted to share that information in case anyone else notices the same with their listing.  I am not sure if it was reset for my listing with this change or if something else caused it to turn off, but I have not touched that setting since initially setting up AirBnB.

Hopefully it was just a setting that impacted me, but I figured I would share.

-Mike

[Cliff H.]

Every time I have to switch my PMS (Porter) from a full sync to pricing/availability (which is a requirement for deactivating Instant Book) a bunch of different AirBnB settings are reset and it's a race to figure out what needs to be reconfigured. My latest drama was finding out (through a guest booking) that my weekend pricing had been reduced over 50% because AirBnB and my PMS (Porter) were fighting over who owned weekend pricing. 

All of this compounded by having AirBnB send me a nastygram threat of having an entire week of my listing's availability blocked off because I dared to cancel a guest's weekend booking out of legitimate concern they were coming up to party and there was no canned "reason" that met AirBnB's standard for cancelling a guest booking, even though they go out of their way to tell Superhosts they can cancel without penalty when turning on Instant Book. 

Beyond the technical glitches, the audacity of any platform telling you they are going to strong arm you by killing availability for your rental for an entire week as retribution for cancelling a weekend booking is completely absurd.