If you use a service that uses AirBNB’s official API to help you manage your vacation rental, and you have noticed less bookings or a lack of new bookings on your calendar (since June) you should check a few things. As the Update broke a LOT of things. See this post from price setting utility “Use Wheelhouse” for an detailed list, but in short, If you want to use any 3rd party tool to help manage your listing, the API migration broke a litany of existing features:
- Linked calendars are removed and will not sync! (breaking your ability to host with multiple partners)
- Automatic pricing rules on AirBNB are broken and removed
- Only one 3rd party tool at a time
- You can not “Co-Host” a listing
- Instant booking must be turned on
- Does not work with AirBNB plus
Worse off, these things break with no notification from AirBNB of the issues, and in non intuitive ways. Sure… you can still set your calendar availability as blocked by default (allowing hosts to manually open dates on their calendar for booking) but the dates will be quietly re-blocked after you open them.
I discovered all this back in June when I became suspicious at the lack of bookings for August (normally a hot month for me), and realized that AirBNB had functionally delisted my unit. After over an hour on the phone with their support and working with the folks at Wheelhouse we were able to find all the bugs on AirBNB’s side, figure out which combination of settings allowed for me to have some semblance of usability for the way I manage my unit, and said good by to listing on other channels because without calendar synchronization the risk of duplicate booking mess is simply too high. I stuck with AirBNB because they remain they remain the most profitable channel for my listing (when it works).
However there continue to be issues. Yesterday, I got a strange email from AirBNB, telling me that “My Software” had been mercilessly preventing an untold number of people from booking my unit and that I would be hidden (delisted) until I “Fixed” it:
