Airbnb Properties Double-Booking Scenarios and How to Prevent Them

The way you manage your Airbnb bookings is the key to increasing efficiency and ensuring that you stay in compliance with the rules of Airbnb. Agree? That’s why getting it wrong by double-booking one of your Airbnb properties management can create an absolute nightmare. Sometimes Airbnb guests cause double-booking on Airbnb properties without even realizing it.

However, in most cases, the double-booking is actually the result of a situation that could have been avoided. Here are the most common scenarios that lead to double-booking and how to prevent them with your Airbnb properties.

Entire Home Versus Separate Room Listings

If you own a home, you might opt to list both your entire home and its individual rooms on Airbnb. While your goal might be to maximize your bookings and get bookings from Airbnb guests at different price points, the reality is that this scenario can lead to a double-booking.

Consider this: you have a single Airbnb guest who wants to stay in a room of your home for a business trip but then another guest books your entire home for a week-long family getaway. What can you do?

How to Fix It

Of course, you can manually block the dates but this doesn’t protect you from a chance to make a mistake. We are all humans after all. To eliminate the human factor you either need to have separate calendars that you’ll synchronize perfectly or use an automated tool.

For this situation, such software as iGMS can be very handy. It has parent and child booking management feature which allows you to see if a room has been booked within one of your Airbnb properties, or if the entire house has been rented out. Without a touch of automation, it can be very difficult to determine if a house or just a room was booked.

Airbnb Properties Listed on Multiple Channels or Accounts

Updating your Airbnb properties across multiple platforms is time-consuming. You simply don’t have the time to do it all, especially if you are managing Airbnb properties for multiple clients. As a result, you might be tempted to update your multiple listings less frequently just so there is less work to do. The result is that you aren’t able to update everything in time after an Airbnb guest has booked a property so you accidentally rent the same property twice.

How to Fix It

Instead of logging in and out of multiple accounts every day, you can use Google calendar synchronization, a channel manager or a vacation rental software such as iGMS to manage all of your Airbnb accounts from a single interface. Vacation rental software usually offers multi-platform synchronization so you can sync all of your calendar data and listings from Airbnb, VRBO, HomeAway, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor. Check out the different options on SaaS comparison sites such as G2Crowd.

Check-in/Check-out Date Changes

Sometimes Airbnb guests change their plans once their arrive at your property and decide that they’d like to check-in earlier or check-out later. While sometimes the guest only wants a few extra hours, a request for a major change could lead to you being asked to add an entire day or extra night to their previously booked accommodations.

As a result, agreeing to such changes without first confirming that your property is available can easily lead to a double-booking. It can be tempting to want to just collect some extra money from a guest that is already paying for a stay at your property. However, you could be doing it at the risk of upsetting the next guest who is ready to check-in.

How to Fix It

If an Airbnb guest wants to check-in early or check-out late, it is important that you have a bird’s eye view of what’s going on with your Airbnb properties so that you do not allow changes before you can confirm that your property is actually available. With a multiple-calendar dashboard, you can keep up with day to day activity so that you know what’s going on to avoid a double-booking. Be polite and reasonable to each guest while explaining the situation. If you have some other property of yours available you can suggest it to either guest.

Long-term Airbnb Guests and Uncertain Timeframes

If you rent your Airbnb properties out on a monthly basis and you frequently have guests who change their minds after arriving or are uncertain about how long their stays might be, this could create problems. That is because you’ll likely be tempted to make your property available for booking on Airbnb before it is actually vacant again, which could lead to a double-booking. On one hand, you have loyal guests that are staying long-term and on the other, you want higher profits from a short-term rental.

How to Fix It

Consider blacking out dates that your property is most likely to be unavailable, even if your long-term guest has not yet confirmed the dates. If you’re completely unsure as to whether your guests will want to stay on after the last confirmed day of their booking, remember that you always have the option to change your unavailable dates as the date in question approaches.

When you block off dates, it will not be possible to book and your listing will not show up in searches for the selected dates. Aso, try to carefully and politely explain to your guests that it is highly important for you to know the dates in advance and set the deadline for when the guest can change his mind. This will help you to avoid double-booking your Airbnb property when you know that it is unlikely to be available.