People love instant gratification.
And one of the biggest problems with many airbnb listings is that you just can’t have. Waiting for a guest to respond and approve your request is less than optimal, especially when the guest could easily go over to orbitz.com and book a hotel on the spot.
So you can see why, Airbnb wants you to turn on Insta-Book.
But is insta-book worth it? And what is insta book you may ask?
If there is a little lightning bolt next to the price, then you can book instantly. My listing below, and the one next to it, both have insta-book enabled. See the lighting bolt?
Insta-Book Pros
Using Insta-book can be a blessing and a curse. I liked using it because as long as I told AirBnB to only approve guests with one positive review, I never had a bad experience from an insta-book stay.
Also, it was a bit less work for me. Guests found a date they liked, and booked it, all without my involvement. As long as my calendar was up to date, that was usually ok.
Lastly, the biggest pro, and the reason I still have it on, is that it lets me stand out in my market and get more bookings. Ultimately, my profit rate is higher with insta-book on versus off. So despite some inconveniences, it ends up being worth it for me. For the experienced operators out there, I suggest you try it and see how it impacts your bottom line.
Insta-Book Cons
If you are just starting out, I definitely don’t recommend it turning on insta-book. Your first few guests are very important, and since you aren’t experienced you may not know exactly how to handle guests, you are probably not quite ready for it yet.
If you are more experienced, you may already know how to handle guests, and you would have blocked off certain dates that you don’t want anyway to book. You really need to stay on top of your calendar, otherwise a date you “meant to block” becomes booked without your involvement. And if you have to cancel it, it leaves a black mark on your account that you really don’t want.
The other bigger con for me was that guests booked dates convenient for them, which may not be the best for my calendar and my bottom line revenue.
Sometimes they would leave a gap of one or two days in between stays, which can be the kiss of death for your occupancy rate, if you get a lot of those since they are hard to fill. There really isn’t much you can do about this, except hope that those dates get picked up last minute by dropping those prices dynamically.
Airbnb definitely wants you to turn it on, and if you ever turn it off, they will really want to know why. In my experience, I definitely did get more bookings. But, I had way less control over who booked and for how long.
How to reduce your risk when using Insta-Book
The host (you in this case) can set certain guidelines such as at least one positive review for instance, or a certain number of days in advance. In competitive markets, most listings may have insta book turned on so you may have to do it to stay competitive.
To reduce your risk, I would definitely recommend you reserve it for people with a positive review, and at least 3 days in advance. I know for my cleaners who are quite busy, getting them to come on short notice is sometimes very difficult. Your situation may be different, so adjust accordingly.
My results of using Insta Book
In Feb of this year, I ended getting 6 bookings for the month, requiring 5 turnovers in ONE month (including the guest checking out on Feb 1). That is 5 cleanings with a 93% occupancy rate. My cleaners were really happy at $150 a pop that month.
My Feb 2015 Calendar Above – Guests made me happy by filling in almost all the dates, even the 2 day gaps!
But in March, Insta Book Kinda Screwed me. My occupancy rate dropped by 12% and so did my revenue. Check out the March Calendar:
My March Calendar with way too much unbooked space for my preference
I had 6 open days, for an ~81% Occupancy rate. That one 3 day booking from the 15th-18th, with two days on either side, basically cost me $1000. Would I have approved that manually if insta-book was turned off? Probably not.
So, I would recommend considering setting a longer min stay, if you are going to do insta book. Regardless, this requires careful monitoring to make sure it can work for you.
In conclusion, insta-book may or may not work for you. It also may depend on your market. So now that you know the pros and cons, you can decide if you want to give it a shot!
UPDATE – May 7 2017 – Airbnb Instabook search filter
The article above is still largely correct, however Airbnb recently made some changes in the way people see results when they search for properties. And it is a very major change. I’m afraid that for those not comfortable with insta-book, you may have to reconsider your feelings because if Airbnb keeps this feature up, it is going get very hard to fill your listing moving forward.
What is the change?
Somewhat recently, Airbnb started showing a big pop-up message the first time you search for a property. Here is what now is displayed:
Before showing you any of the search results, Airbnb now displays this message. It sounds pretty innocent, and I think most Airbnb users, who stay at Airbnb only occasionally, will probably click this button. The working is a bit deceptive, of course I want to get listings I can book instantly! What users don’t realize though that if they click this they will miss on many properties. What the button really should say is “Yes I want to limit my results and have fewer options”, which most people would probably not click. I have to say this is pretty effective language.
They also have a new slider above search results, that lets you toggle on and off this filter. It will remember your choice, which it seems AIrbnb is highly encouraging.
Impact to owners and hosts of Airbnb’s New insta-book Search Results Filter
As it stands now, this change seriously impacts my recommendation for Insta-book. Prior to this I recommended it to some people, but I thought it wasn’t right for every host. But this changes things. I expect a major drop in revenue and occupancy rates for hosts that do not enable insta book.
Through highly encouraging wording and the instabook search filter pop-up, I would now expect the majority of users to enable this filter when searching for properties. Which means that if you don’t have insta-book enabled, your traffic is going to drop for sure. By how much, I can’t say yet because it is too new, but I would except losing at least 50% of your monthly views. I am tempted to turn off insta-book on one of my listings for a week just to see what happens.
Regardless, my new updated insta-book advice to new hosts is this: Turn on insta-book if at all possible. For those experienced hosts who currently do not have it turned on, I would advise you cautiously watch your traffic (Property views) and occupancy trends. If you start to notice a big decline, then you may have to turn it on. They are forcing everyone’s hand in this, and I get why. It is clearly a better experience for guests. Nearly every guest loves insta-book, and would prefer to book properties instantly instead of waiting. And ultimately, that is why Airbnb has made this change, like it or not.
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Do you have any Data from AirBnB regarding what Percentage of Users use Instant Booking or other metrics like
Are they last minute bookings vs 3 Days in Advance
What made a difference for a prospect whta making an iNstant booking
Great questions, I don’t have that data on hand and I imagine it will vary by market.
When using Instant Book you can set certain conditions. In many markets we manage, it is hard to arrange a cleaner last minute so we do not let guests use instant book more than 3 days in advance. You can set it up to 7 days out to prevent guests from using instant book right before a stay if that will impact your operations.
We do see a high percentage of bookings come in via instant book, and I think this will only increase. Many more people each year are using Airbnb, and instant book is something that many users are comfortable with since it closely mimics what they have experienced before when booking hotels: ie find something you like that is available, pay, and book! Waiting hours or longer for a confirmation is a foreign concept to many guests, especially new ones and you could lose bookings to hosts that use instant book.
I see guests can cancel such a booking within three days. This could be a problem, because your marketing time is reduced by 3 days of they do. I am not sure if they pay a a penalty.
As host I think you pay $50 if you cancel insta booking. And it goes up if you cancel regularly.
I would like to try it but we run an agency and could make mistakes keeping calendars in sync.
Hi thanks for your comment. When users cancel it will depend on your (the hosts) cancellation policy. If you are using a strict policy, they certainly will get a penalty. If you want help keeping your calendars in sync, that is something that VR Front Desk Agents can certainly help you with, just contact us to see how we can reduce your workload!
This was helpful, thanks for sharing!
No problem!
we’ve noticed an absolutely massive drop in bookings this year, while the three previous years were consistent, but grew slightly year on year. We’re wondering if this is because we don’t have instant book? can’t think of any other explanation unless the whole world in on on airbnb
Hey Helga,
Sorry to hear about that. There could be all kinds of reasons for a big drop of your Airbnb Traffic. Have you completed an Airbnb Market Analysis? See our post on that in the blog section. You should compare your property to your neighbors to see if you are priced correctly. You should also check your images compared to your competition. Images are very important, maybe others near you have better images or text in addition to cheaper prices, it could all be related. Let us know how it goes for you hope you can improve it!
Thanks for this great article! I just listed my space and for the life of me I can’t find where to turn off Instant Booking. It’s SO frustrating. I’ve Googled it and there is just no where that there is a place to turn it off completely.
Go to host->manage listings, there should be a switch right on the top of edit your listing on the right side. Slide insta book to the left so it is no longer orange, that should do it!
Chiming in a little late, but I’ll just say that I would probably try instant booking (I’m a host), if Airbnb would make it possible to control min/max days for selected lengths of time, or at least for individual months. I don’t want 2-3 day bookings 2+ months away, but they would be helpful in filling the gaps in the more immediate months. Going to stay with the non instant bookings until they figure this out, which I won’t hold my breath for.
Hey Andrew,
Well, you will be happy to know that you actually can now control this. Go to your calendar, availability settings, then “Add a requirement for seasons or weekends”. Here you can specify a different minumum nights for a future time, season, or any specific date. A very useful feature! Hope that helps.
When did this Instant book option become available in Airbnb?
Would you know what are the different host fees? Does instant booking increase the fee percentage for host?
What about guests?
I don’t think Instabook changes the fee charged at all, although I did hear that in some countries Airbnb has plans to start to try that (like 5% host fee with no insta book , 3% host fee with insta book turned on). In the USA, that is not currently the case but who knows what the future holds. It is clear Airbnb is pushing insta book as it is more convenient for the guests, and it is likely you will earn more revenue and get ranked higher in search results if you turn it on. I would recommend make sure you require verified ID and a positive review before you allow a guest to insta book if you are worried about trying it.
this was really helpful thanks !
Does anyone know when ABB started screening out non-instant booking properties with the screen that appears when you search for a property. if you do not cancel the popup screen you only get Instant Booking properties in your search!Great site by the way.
Good question Andrew, this is pretty new feature they recently rolled out. I’m not sure if its the same in every market yet either, will have to do some investigation on that. But it is a pretty major filter that Airbnb highly encourages users to turn on (though it is not on by default). I’m going to update this article based on this new feature, it makes enabling instabook nearly a requirement will be interesting to see the impact of this.
Well I have only one property takes six people but my enquiry numbers have fallen for end of April there something going on!!
Thanks for the Update Andrew, let us know how it continues to go for you or if you see other changes!