Guest inquiries.

[Kay12]

Please can someone explain the following to me? I have a potential guest who messages me an inquiry.....they only wish to know something about my property before they make a decision to book. I answer this question, the guest then considers this, and makes a booking or not. If they do not, fine, but it seems that I am marked down because I did not send a quote. The guest didn't ask for a quote, just a question about the house! How do I deal with this. Surely a host can have a discussion with a potential guest without being penalised! 

Kay.

[Amaris0]

Ok, there are two types of contact, a Request to Book which you have to accept or decline within 24hiurs or and an Enquiry, you have confirmed you received the latter. 

With an Enquiry, as you have mentioned, it is just a question and does not mean the guests wish to book or will book once you have responded although you are required to make the initial response within 24hours to avoid your response rate being impacted. You do not need to send any special offers for an Enquiry or even a Request to Book; any special offers are strictly subject to your decision to offer such. You do not need to provide quotes either as this is automatically provided by Airbnb when the guest does a search and finds your property.

It is not clear how you have been penalised and why you feel any penalties are as a result of this enquiry you received – perhaps you could clarify this in order to receive a more specific answer?

BW, Ama

[Susan115]

I am uneasy about what is going on with inquiries.  This past week I have had two inquiries:  one was a question about our property; the other the person was asking about availability in 2017, but had put in a near date on their inquiry in order to be able to ask the question.  I responded to both inquiries within a few hours and pre-approved the first inquiry.  The person did not follow up with a booking.

 In both cases, I received serveral messages from Airbnb asking me to pre-approve the  potential guests.  One I had approved, but the Airbnb prompts kept coming.  The other I could not preapprove because my rental was not available.  Why is Airbnb prompting for preapprovals on inquiries?  Does this affect my ratings?

[Nancy146]

I would love to know the answer to this, too. I only book 6 months in advance and people want to reserve past that, but in order to ask me a question, they have to book a date that's available, even though they don't want that date. Why can't they just ask about a future reservation without having to make a reservation to contact me with a question?

So I approve the dates they don't want because I don't want to be penalized for declining them and have my listing drop in viewer displays, which causes a lot of back and forth to help the guest understand I'm NOT approving them for dates that aren't available yet and they have to cancel the dates they booked just to ask a question!