Managing booking requests with Request to Book and Instant booking

Updated 2 months ago | 3 min read time
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Request to Book is a product that offers you full control to accept or decline booking requests. It’s the opposite of the Instant Booking model.

When you’ve opted into Request to Book and a guest makes a reservation, you have 24 hours to either accept or decline their request before it expires. Letting booking requests expire negatively impacts guests and their booking experience.

What’s in this article:

  1. Accepting or declining a guest request
  2. Switching to Instant booking
  3. BETA is available within these countries

Accepting or declining a guest request

With the Request to Book model, you’re given the option to manually accept or decline booking requests. Here’s how: 

  1. Log in to your inbox and open the booking email notification
  2. Click on the Accept or decline request button – this will open the Request details page of the extranet
  3. Under Booking request details, select Accept or Decline 

If you prefer, you can accept or decline booking requests directly via the extranet. Here’s how:

  1. Log in to the extranet
  2. Go to the Reservations tab and select Booking request
  3. Under Status, you’ll see reservations with a pending response – click on the link under Guests
  4. In the Booking request details, click on Accept or Decline to accept or decline a request

Before declining a booking request, make sure you review our Non-discrimination Policy. Declining a lot of requests can affect your reservation rate and where your listing appears in search.

Switching to Instant booking

Opting into Instant booking allows you to automatically accept booking requests and offer a seamless experience to your guests. If you want to avoid the risk of your booking requests expiring and protect travellers from a negative experience, we recommend choosing the Instant booking model. 

Here’s how to switch to the Instant booking option:

  1. Log in to the extranet 
  2. Select the Property tab and click on Policies
  3. Under Other policies, click on Edit within the How you receive bookings box
  4. Under How can guests book your property? choose All guests can book instantly
  5. Click on Save

You can switch from the All guests can book instantly option to the All guests will need to request to book option anytime.

BETA is available within these countries

This is a BETA version and it is only available in Italy, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Australia and The United States.

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