We just experienced a guest who booked through Airbnb with a Flexible cancellation policy months ago, and now that their trip is a few days away, cancelled their Flexible booking and then immediately re-booked as a Non-Refundable booking through Airbnb at our current lower rates (synced through PriceLabs) and using the Airbnb 10% off non-refundable discount, costing us a significant amount of money.
We believe this may be the latest tactic by travelers, to book Flexible first and then re-book non-refundable close to their travel dates and both guarantee their dates, maintain their flexibility, and save money. Using this methodology, guests could book during primetime and not worry about the price when booking Flexible and anticipate owners to lower rates for last minute bookings, and save tons of money by finally booking at the lowest rates offered by owners.
In order to combat this, we would like to request the following feature(s) in OwnerRez to prevent recurrence:
1. The ability to select what to do in the event of a fully refundable cancellation, such as options to:
a. Open the dates immediately and use current daily pricing (this is what currently happens)
b. Open the dates immediately and use the same pricing that was originally booked - I believe for this, OwnerRez would have to permanently record the originally booked daily prices, which I believe it already does in order to calculate the total rent recorded for the reservation. Or if not, simply use the total rent applicable to the cancelled reservation and evenly divide it across the number of days of the cancelled reservation.
c. Open the dates immediately and raise/lower the daily current pricing by a certain % - this would prevent others from trying this same tactic, if prices are suddenly much higher than when a booking was originally made
d. Open the dates immediately and raise/lower the daily current pricing by a certain %, with the ability to select if the dates are within a certain upcoming time range (e.g. within 2 months, 3 weeks, 4 days, etc.) - this would allow to customize settings for last minute cancellations or farther out cancellations (this would be our most preferred feature request)
e. Automatically create a block for the same dates which were just automatically cancelled - this would give time for the owner to log in and adjust prices manually, or allow time for a pricing third party, like PriceLabs, to update the pricing for the re-opened dates, at appropriate rates
