Thoughts on Minimum night bookings and length of instant booking availability--

[Rob134]

Issues;

Minimum nightly booking amounts

Instant Booking

Special Offer

As a long time 13 year "traditional"-as in vrbo, flipkey owner/manager but newer to airbnb, I will say I am impressed with how much business they can do..Definitely worth having, but there are 2 areas where they could improve if they could tweak their system, and so I throw this open to conversation and hope airbnb can do something about this as well as look forward to hearing thoughts from fellow owner/renters.

First of all, our condos are the full condo, ( so not a room etc) and the nightly minimum I set of 3 is fine, but here are the areas (and this is also why I dont use the instant booking feature)  

Minimum nightly booking setting-I have mine set at 3, but when I have a 2 night gap it is not "visible" to the potential guest as the system will ask for 3 nights. It would be wonderful if the system could be taught  to allow the "gaps" to be available, while maintaining the normal 3 nt minimum.

Instant bookings-Love the idea, but again this allows gaps. and during what should be 100% primetime, you may have considerable loss of nights booked by that feature, for example someone books 7/1-7/4, then 7/6-7/10, then 7/11-7/17..When I do it myself I always try to shift my guests and many times they can. Their dates are not so much etched in stone, and that is a huge benefit to your overall business. Again could the system be tweaked to make date requests "Butt up" to an existing departure or arrival date, or make sure there is a 3 nt gap?

I am certain it could be done, but whether the collective will is in agreement that this is a good thing is uncertain. So that is why I dont use instant booking when we get to the busy times. Off season (as in our case from mid August to end February I am okay with gaps as they are not 100% booked..

Also on the instant booking it is a 3 month, 6 month block..Effective date start and end date would be much better in my opinion.

Special Offer--I just had this happen, so it struck me as odd. I had a guest who I was willing to give a discount to, but I could not offer that to her as she already had an existing reservation request. I totally do not understand that. How is it that you cannot offer s special offer to the proverbial "bird in the hand" 

Thoughts? Would love to hear from AIRBNB braian trust on this as well as fellow full time/full unit owners...

Thanks,

Rob

RobsCondos 

[Rob134]

pardon my typos, *Brain trust of Airbnb and *a instead of s...

[Jan-Tilman0]

I am not satisfied withe a rule of airbnb! When I do not accept, do not deny and also do not want to make a new offer, cause I can't by the information I've got from the costumer, BUT I ANSWER AND ASK BY MYSELF to make a proper price - we have a huge court outside of BErlin , it would not be ok to ask for 5 people a daily price of 400 € , but for 12 it's to low.. this is just a simple example, there are mor detailled and difficult ones... We can host up to 40 people! So it should be possible to talk first! SO: I answer within 24 hours, but airbnb does not count that! On the other hand, I have a travelling job and I am no slave to airbnb - the would not be able to pay me ;-))) - I want more than 24 hours.. Best Jan

[Andrea9]

Hi, yes unfortunately Airbnb has some set regulations that are not always easy to navigate around and require some out of the box thinking.

To answer two issues -

Case of receiving a booking request and when you wish to offer a Special Offer - you can do one of two things:

1)

Message the guest that the system only allows you to issue a Special Offer replying to a non-committal INQUIRY, but not with a real booking REQUEST and for this reason you'll decline their request with the standard pricing and submit a Special Offer with the new and reduced price for her to book.

2)

Or you could tell them you will accept the request as is, and then make a change to the reservation for them to accept.

The 24h time to accept/decline a request or pre-approve/decline an inquiry can be quite short if there are still questions open and there are several time zones. But even that is easy enough. I always tell them I'm penalized by Airbnb if I don't decide within 24h which is why I will decline if I haven't heard back from them, but they can easily re-submit their request upon messaging their answers.

Has worked every time for me.

@Rob134 @Jan-Tilman0

[Zacharias0]

@Rob134We can't have it all. Much as we want to. We all want to be booked 30 out of 30 days but unless you have a full time staff and multiple properties it just doesn't work that way. Case in point you mentioned you have a 3 day minimum but sometimes that leaves you with a 2 day gap. Well you can adjust those specific days left open to allow for a 2 day reservation. If your spaces fill up 30 days out with 3 day reservations then at the beginning of the new month just go through your calendar and change your settings to a minimum of 2 day reservations. So many people book last minute that it sounds like it would work in your situation. You'd have to do a lot of quick turns and not have much room for error, but if this is a full time job for you then it sounds like it'd be worth it.

In regards to the special offer the question wasn't exactly clear...are you stating you received a reservation request and you cannot send them a special offer in return with a discounted price? If that is your issue then why not accept the reservation request and then send them a special offer? Id much prefer to bargain with someone that has already booked than someone who hasn't.

Cheers.