What Instant Book actually does
Instant Book lets a guest who meets your criteria confirm the dates on their own, without waiting for you to say yes. With it switched off, every booking becomes a request that sits there until you approve it.
That is the whole difference. It is one setting, and most hosts treat it as a safety switch rather than a commercial one.
Why switching it off costs you quietly
There are two separate things going on, and neither of them shows up in your calendar.
Guests filter you out. A lot of people either prefer instantly bookable places or actively filter for them, especially when they are booking close to the travel date and especially on a phone. If they never see your listing, you never find out. There is no notification for a guest who was filtered away.
Every extra step loses people. A request means waiting. While they wait, they keep looking, they find something they can book now, or they simply lose interest. The booking journey is not a queue where people patiently hold their place.
So the cost is real but invisible. Nothing in your dashboard says "you lost eleven bookings this month because guests could not book instantly." That is exactly why the setting stays off for years without anyone questioning it.
When switching it off is the right call
There are good reasons to keep approval on, and they are worth naming clearly:
High-value or sensitive listings where screening genuinely matters.
Shared spaces, where whether a guest fits is not optional.
Buildings with strict rules, where the wrong guest becomes a serious problem for you.
Markets or periods where the party risk is high.
The mistake is not switching it off. The mistake is switching it off everywhere, by default, without ever checking what it costs.
How to keep control with it on
Most of what hosts want from manual approval is available without it. You can require government ID verification. You can require that the guest has a positive review history from previous hosts. You can write explicit house rules that a guest has to accept. You can set a minimum stay that filters out the bookings you do not want, and you can add preparation time between stays so you are never caught short.
Those guardrails do the screening. Approval on top of them is usually belt and braces, and the braces are costing you.
If you run more than one listing
Set the policy by tier, not by fear. Instant Book on by default across the standard inventory, with the requirements above doing the filtering. Keep request and approve for the specific listings that genuinely need a human look at the guest before the dates are gone.
One blanket policy applied out of caution across a whole portfolio is the version of this that quietly suppresses the whole book.
The full article, with the reasoning behind each guardrail, is on our blog: Instant Book on Airbnb: the lever most hosts switch off, and when that costs you.
- Joana & Tony