Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] This is short term rental management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your host, yours truly, Luke Carl, short term rental management. It is a great day for a wonderful day. Today we're going to talk about accepting, declining. Should I accept a guest? Should I not accept a guess? What does that do for my algorithms, et cetera? The accept decline system with Luke on this week's short term rental management.
[00:00:41] This episode of the short term management show is brought to you by short term rental, long term wealth.
[00:00:48] This is the book in the STR space written by my lovely wife, Avery Carle. It has hundreds of reviews on Amazon, and it will teach you literally everything you need to know about STR, short term rental, long term wealth, the book wherever books are sold.
[00:01:08] All right, first I want to mention that most of this stuff that I'm talking about right now is going to be Airbnb specific. So you've got accept, decline, pre approve.
[00:01:18] All right? Now, accept means that they've already paid. That's the biggest thing to keep in mind. And that means if you click that button, they're booked, sign, sealed, delivered, they paid. They're on the books, on the calendar. So that's pretty cool. Pre approved means they have not paid. That's the biggest difference between accept and pre approve.
[00:01:36] And you can pre approve them to book those dates, but then they would still have to put in their information and, you know, actually choose to stay with you, which they may or may not. You can also auto pre approve people with your management software. Most management software will allow auto pre approved, which I do recommend. Let's make things as easy on ourselves as possible. Why not?
[00:02:03] Now, as far as algorithms are concerned, we have no way to prove any of this stuff.
[00:02:07] I will say that I don't really like to decline and accept.
[00:02:11] In other words, I'm okay to decline a pre approve if I need to. I don't like to decline and accept because I feel like they're a little deeper in the process and maybe it's not as good for my algorithms. I, there's no way to know any of this stuff. Just kind of, you know, do my best on years and years of experience here. I will generally accept and accept. Why not? They want to book my house. They've already paid. I'm in the business of renting my house. Let's go ahead and rent the damn thing. You know what I mean? So usually I'll go ahead and accept pre approved. Now, there's a couple of different ways. Strategies for pre approved. You could pre approve, knowing that they're not going to book it. And then you have no reason to believe that that's going to affect your algorithms in any kind of negative manner.
[00:02:54] Or you could decline the pre approve if you feel like there's some shenanigans. Now, I will pre approve a pre approve, even if I feel like there's going to be some shenanigans. Like if they ask some stupid question. Let me put it this way. I have in the past said, I'm so sorry, this house is not going to work for you because, of whatever reason, too many people, etcetera, and I want to pre approve them anyway, and most of the time, they don't notice. They just move on. And then I have no reason to believe this is going to affect my algorithms in any kind of negative manner. I think it's maybe been two times ever where they said, well, wait a minute, you just said, I can't book your house, but you pre approved me. Well, just don't book it. You know? Again, no way to prove the algorithms here, at least to my knowledge. I've done extensive research on this, and there's, there's stuff out there on it, but I would highly recommend you don't decline accepts if at all possible.
[00:03:49] Now, worst case, you could reach out to the guests and maybe ask them to change their mind on their end, say, sorry, this isn't going to work out. I know you already paid and you're already, you're ready to go here, but this isn't going to work. So I need you to, you know, resend your, your, your booking. Change your mind.
[00:04:10] Okay? And now, again, I do want to mention that none of this stuff is going to happen if they instant book. Right? So all these things that we're talking about are only going to happen if they don't qualify, for whatever reason, to instant book your house.
[00:04:25] They don't have a review from a guest. There's caveats involved with instant book whatever your caveats are, if they didn't meet those requirements, for whatever reason. So we got to go to the pre approved system. Pre approve, accept, deny system. Okay? So keep that in mind. Also, these things are all going to be fairly similar on all platforms, but maybe have some different terminology.
[00:04:44] Also, the verbo pre approve is a little bit different, wherein it will actually hold the dates in some cases, so make sure youre keeping an eye on things. And, and also, some, a lot of times, these policies change. Right? So sometimes, uh, if you're listening to this in four years, maybe something has changed from the date of this being recorded, which is in 2024. So, uh, long story short, in most cases, you do want to accept a booking. That means they have paid. They're going to stay in your house, they're going to give your money. That is the definition of the entire concept. It's a winden. Okay, so take those guests if you can. Now, if they say they're going to bring a keg in 27 people do it to a bedroom, then maybe we reassess the situation. All right, so accept the client pre approve instant book.
[00:05:32] Going to keep it short today. Hope you're enjoying your summer. Hell, maybe it's fall by now. I don't know. But you can find me anytime at the shortterm shop.com if you like what you're hearing, if you're picking up what I'm putting down, you can join me on a live weekly call to talk about your next short term rental or ask questions about the one you already have. I am live once per week on Zoom and would love to have you come and say hello. It's strquestions.com.
[00:06:04] that's strquestions.com. come and join us. I love you. Oh, let me give you a quote. I'm going to give you a quote on this very short Tuesday podcast.
[00:06:15] And the quote of the day is, don't expect you from other people. Don't expect you from others. Don't expect you from people unsighted. I actually googled it. There's a billion different versions of this quote out there, and I couldn't find anybody that was the author of the quote. But I love this because I do get frustrated oftentimes when I'm traveling around and moving around and going and interacting with people, and I'm like, why the hell did you just do that?
[00:06:44] That is not how I would have done that. So don't expect you from others.
[00:06:50] I'm going to leave you with that little tidbit of wisdom on short term rental management. Don't overthink it.
