Airbnb Communication Guidelines and Best Practices

Owned by Colin Cohan (Unlicensed)
Jul 30, 2018

Response rate and response time: The quicker and more consistently you respond to guests, the better your listing can do in search. Search also considers how many guests you accept. Rejecting a large number of requests, or failing to respond to inquiries will affect your placement and visibility in search.

Response rate is the percentage of new inquiries and reservation requests responded to (by either accepting/pre-approving or declining) within 24 hours in the past 30 days. As a Boost customer, Instant Book reservations will help maintain your response rate, but you must also respond to inquiries and requests . Your response time is the average amount of time it took you to respond to all the new messages in the past 30 days.

If you’ve received fewer than 10 new message threads in the past 30 days, your response rate and response time will be based on the 10 most recent message threads from the past 90 days.

To improve response rate and response time, do the following within 24 hours:

  • Accept or decline reservation requests

  • Pre-approve or decline trip requests

  • Reply to new messages from guests

Your response rate and response time aren’t affected by follow-up messages between hosts and guests.