Hi @Cormac0, one thing has me quite confused here. When you pre-approve an inquiry, the dates should not be automatically "blocked"; rather, by default they are still available for another guest to request or instant-book. There are a few circumstances in which dates are blocked that you didn't manually block in your calendar:
1. A guest has a confirmed reservation.
2. A guest has submitted a Request within the past 24 hours, awaiting host to Accept or Decline
3. A confimed booking has been cancelled by the host
4. A guest has attempted to Instant Book the property, but their payment method has not gone through (e.g. credit card declined, etc) - in which case, the dates are locked until the guest submits a valid payment.
The fourth scenario has happened to me a few times - in each case, Airbnb has sent an email and provided the option of retroactively declining the booking so as to free up the dates.
There's another thing that happens specifically to Instant Book hosts. When a guest begins attempting to book a place, it triggers a lock on their selected dates. But if for any reason the booking process doesn't complete, it can take quite a long time for the lock to be released. In the interim, however, the host does not recieve any information on the pending booking, which can cause much confusion. Additionally, glitches do occur in which you have to contact Airbnb to have them manually unlock the dates.
Regarding pre-approvals: take them with a grain of salt. When guest send Inquiries, they're just using the Contact Host feature to get information - they can write to any number of hosts without committing to a booking. In my experience, most of them are not serious and don't wind up booking. You need not pre-approve or decline these at all; all you have to do is write something back quickly.
Now if i've misunderstood you and you are actually going through and blocking the dates yourself when pre-approving a guest....well, stop that, it's not necessary.
