Airbnb alteration requests: what to check before you accept

A guest writes to say something came up. Can they arrive Thursday instead of Tuesday? Leave two days early? Stay one more night? The request lands with an Accept button under it, and most hosts tap it without a second look.

An Airbnb alteration request is not a small courtesy. It reprices the booking, it changes how your cancellation policy applies, and it moves at least one turnover on your cleaner's schedule. All three are settled the moment you tap Accept, and Airbnb doesn't show them to you in one place.

What follows is what to check before you accept, when to decline, and how to counter with terms that work for you.

What is an Airbnb alteration request?

An Airbnb alteration request is a guest's request to change a confirmed reservation: different dates, more or fewer nights, or a different number of guests. Airbnb now calls it a trip change request, though many hosts and several property management tools still use the older name. The booking only changes if you accept.

Guests can send one any time after the booking is confirmed and before checkout, including in the middle of their stay. There is no deadline for you to respond, but Airbnb points out that answering quickly helps avoid cancelled reservations. Airbnb's page on responding to a guest's trip change request covers the buttons.

It works in both directions. You can send a guest a trip change request of your own, proposing new dates, a different guest count or a different price. That becomes useful when a guest's request is close to workable but not quite, which comes up below.

What happens to the money when you accept?

Airbnb reprices the booking for the new dates and settles the difference on its own. The guest sees the original total and the new total before sending the request. If the new total is higher, they are charged. If it's lower, they are refunded to the payment method they booked with.

A few details decide whether that works in your favour:

• The new dates are priced at your current pricing. Any custom prices or discounts you have set for those dates apply. Move a booking from a quiet week into a holiday and the total goes up. Move it the other way and you refund the difference.
• Length discounts can fall away. If a stay drops below the length your weekly or monthly discount needs, the guest may no longer qualify for it.
• Special offers don't carry over. If the guest booked on a pre-approval you sent, any change reprices the booking as if it were new. You can keep the original price, but only by setting it yourself in a trip change request.
• Taxes are recalculated under the current rules for your location.
• Payment can fail. For some payment methods, the guest has 48 hours to pay any increase. If they don't, the change is declined automatically and the original booking stands.

The one to slow down on is a shortened stay. When you accept a request to drop nights, you are agreeing to refund those nights.

Take a guest booked for six nights at $180 a night who asks to leave two nights early. Accept, and the nightly charges drop from $1,080 to $720, so $360 goes back to the guest, before fees and taxes. Decline, and the original six-night booking stays in place. If the guest cancels instead, Airbnb refunds them according to your cancellation policy, which may return far less.

Declining costs you nothing on Airbnb's side. Airbnb states that a host can always decline a trip change request with no consequences.

How does a date change affect your cancellation policy?

Your cancellation policy keeps applying after the change, to the updated reservation. That sounds harmless until you notice that the refund window now runs from the new dates.

Hosts on Airbnb's community forum describe the same pattern again and again. A guest who is close to check-in, and past the point of a full refund, asks to move the booking a few weeks later. The host agrees as a favour. Then the guest cancels the new booking, which is now far enough out to qualify for a refund they could never have had on the original dates.

So before you accept a move to later dates, check where the new check-in lands against your own policy's refund cut-off. If the move puts the booking back inside a refundable window, you have handed the guest a free cancellation.

Length changes can switch which policy applies. Stays of 28 nights or more fall under your long-term cancellation policy. If an alteration turns a shorter stay into 28 nights or more, the long-term policy applies from then on. If a monthly stay is cut to 27 nights or fewer, your standard policy takes over.

Monthly stays have extra rules. Before the trip starts, a change that keeps the booking at 28 nights or more can go through automatically, without your approval. If a monthly stay is shortened below 28 nights, the guest is responsible for the next 30 days of payment from the day of the change, or until the end of the reservation if that comes sooner. All of this is set out in Airbnb's help article on modifying a home reservation as a host. If you take long bookings regularly, our guide to Airbnb monthly stays covers what they change in the rest of your operation.

Should you accept, decline, or counter?

Accept when three things are true. The new dates are genuinely free on every platform you list on. The new total is one you are happy with. And your cleaner can do the turnovers that result.

The first check is easy to skip. Calendar sync between platforms isn't instant, so dates that look open on Airbnb may already be booked on Vrbo or Booking.com. Accepting an Airbnb change onto those dates creates a double booking that you then have to unwind.

Decline when:

• The change moves a near-term booking far enough out to reopen your refund window
• It shifts a stay off your busiest dates at short notice, leaving nights you are unlikely to resell
• It leaves a gap between two stays too short for anyone to book
• It overlaps dates already taken on another platform

Counter when the idea is fine but the terms aren't. Decline the guest's request, then send your own trip change request with the dates, guest count and price you will accept. Airbnb's own guidance is exactly this: if you can accommodate a different change, message the guest or send them a trip change request.

What you shouldn't do is make the guest's change for them just because they asked. Airbnb warns that changing or cancelling reservations on a guest's behalf can put your standing as a host at risk. Point them to the request option in their trip instead.

Airbnb also suggests giving a clear reason when you decline. A message you can adapt:

Thanks for letting me know. I can't move the booking to those dates as requested, because [they're already booked / the new dates change the terms of the booking]. I've sent you a change request for [dates] at [total] instead. If that doesn't work for you, your original booking is still confirmed and nothing changes.

A few mechanics are worth knowing before you start going back and forth:

• A reservation can have only one change request open at a time.
• Changes are capped at 3 a day and 10 in total for a single reservation.
• You can't edit a request once it's sent. Cancel it and send a new one.
• Nothing can be changed once checkout has passed. Money adjustments after that go through the Resolution Center.

What does an accepted change do to your turnovers?

Every accepted date change moves at least one clean. Your calendar updates the moment you accept, but your cleaner isn't looking at your calendar. They are working from whatever they were last told.

Four changes to think through:

The guest leaves early. The checkout moves earlier, so the clean can happen sooner. On its own that's easy. It gets harder if you resell the freed nights, because now there is a new guest and a turnover in the gap that your cleaner has never heard of.

The guest stays longer. The checkout moves later. A cleaner booked for the original day arrives at an occupied property, and the time before the next arrival shrinks, sometimes to a same-day turnover. Guests on Instant Book reservations can add nights up to 72 hours before checkout without asking you, and Airbnb notifies you when it happens. If the window collapses to a few hours, our guide to back-to-back Airbnb bookings covers how to run it.

The next guest arrives earlier. This one is easy to miss, because nothing changed for the guest who is leaving. The clean before the new arrival now has to be finished sooner. A cleaner who planned around the old arrival date has less time than they think.

The guest count changes. More guests means more beds made up and more towels out. A calendar only shows dates, so this change has to come from you.

For each one, your cleaner needs the new checkout time, the next arrival time and the guest count if it changed. Then check that they've actually seen it. A message nobody has read hasn't changed anything.

This is the part GleamSync handles. GleamSync, a vacation rental cleaning coordination tool, reads the calendar feeds from your Airbnb and Vrbo listings twice a day. When a booking change moves a clean in the coming month, it messages your cleaner by email, SMS or WhatsApp, and the day before each clean window opens it sends a reminder built from the calendar as it stands at that moment. Your cleaner doesn't need an account or an app. Guest numbers still have to come from you.

Frequently asked questions

How long do I have to respond to an Airbnb alteration request?

Airbnb sets no time limit. It does note that responding quickly helps avoid cancelled reservations, since a guest left waiting may decide to cancel and book elsewhere.

Does declining an alteration request hurt my listing?

Airbnb states that hosts can always decline a trip change request with no consequences. The original reservation stays exactly as it was, and the guest can still cancel under your cancellation policy if they can't make the original dates.

Can a guest extend their stay without my approval?

On Instant Book reservations, yes. Guests may be able to add nights with instant confirmation up to 72 hours before their scheduled checkout, and Airbnb sends you a notification when an extension is confirmed. On other reservations they have to send a trip change request.

What if the new total on a guest's request doesn't work for me?

Decline it and send your own trip change request. A host's request can change the dates, the guest count and the price, so you can offer the same change on terms you're happy with. The guest then accepts or declines, and if they decline, the original booking stands.

How many times can a reservation be changed?

Airbnb caps changes at 3 a day and 10 in total for a single reservation, and only one change request can be open at a time. Past that limit, you may need to contact Airbnb to make further changes.

Related reading

• Back-to-back Airbnb bookings: why turnovers go wrong
• How to share your Airbnb calendar with your cleaner
• Airbnb monthly stays: what changes in your operation
• How to handle difficult Airbnb guests
• Airbnb guest message templates for every stage of the stay

When the dates move, your cleaner should hear about it

GleamSync reads your Airbnb and Vrbo calendars and messages your cleaner by email, SMS or WhatsApp when a booking change moves a clean in the coming month. Your cleaner doesn't need an account or an app. It costs $8 a month per property.

See how it works