Booking Inquiries Now Expire After Six Months
We’re helping hosts catch up with artist inquiries.
Although host response rates have improved tremendously over the years, there’s still a significant number of these lovely volunteers who fall behind or lose touch. When a inquiries start piling up on a host, it can be discouraging (when they finally login) to see 15 or more artists waiting for an answer. Plus, it can be challenging to compose a response only to discover that the artist is no longer interested.
So inquiries will now be automatically dismissed after 6 months. No email notifications will be sent, but artists will be able to see the status in their inquiry download spreadsheet.
These hosts will now have a “blank” booking status with the artist (instead of “pending”), and that will return them to the top-half of your host search results so you can try again if you wish.
Remember, hosts already get a reminder every Tuesday if they have pending inquiries to answer, so there’s still no need to ask “did you get my email?”
However, this new change should help inspire hosts to catch up with their inquiries, and help artists get a fresh look at hosts who may have recently woken up after an extended break.
Twist? It’s possible to think that dismissing inquiries will make it harder to see which hosts are actually responsive. However, we can now measure these dismissals as a percentage statistic, so artists will be able to see the response rate (like 85%) in the host profile. Hosts will also be able to see how they compare to the community at large, either as a source of accomplishment or as incentive to use our easy response tools.