If your bookings are down, you’ve probably blamed the algorithm, the market, or the season before you’ve ever opened your own AirBnB settings panel. Between our portfolio of 100-plus properties and the 500-plus hosts we coach inside Strategic Host, the AirBnB settings panel is the first place we look when a host asks us why bookings have stalled, and it’s rarely the algorithm’s fault. Some switches in your account are quietly adding friction between a guest and a reservation. Others are handing your pricing decisions to a platform whose incentives don’t match yours. None of them are neutral. Here are three AirBnB settings to turn off today, five to turn on immediately, and why each one moves the needle.

Quick Links

• Turn Off: Required Booking Messages
• Turn Off: Extra Person Fees
• Turn Off: Airbnb Smart Pricing
• Turn On: Professional Host Tools
• Turn On: Instant Book
• Turn On: Short Stay Cleaning Fee Reduction
• Turn On: Automatic Reviews for Great Guests
• Turn On: All Amenity and Safety Checkboxes

The host who books the most isn’t the one with the most rules or the most gatekeeping. It’s the one who made saying yes easy. That’s the lens for everything below.

Turn Off: Required Booking Messages

If your listing requires guests to send a message before they can book, turn it off. That’s a hoop between a guest and a reservation, and every extra step is a chance for that guest to close the tab and book the property next door instead. If a guest has a question, they’ll ask it. You don’t need to force the conversation before they’re allowed to say yes. Money loves speed. Slow down the path to booking and you slow down your calendar.

Turn Off: Extra Person Fees

Turn off extra person fees. Most hosts who charge them didn’t set out to. Their cleaner charges more when additional bedrooms are used, so the host passes that cost to the guest as a per-person fee, and the math quietly stops adding up. When you add an extra person fee, you show up in search at one price and deliver a different number at checkout. The guest who found you at a competitive rate builds out their stay, sees the total, and bounces, because you’re no longer in line with other properties at your bedroom count that aren’t charging that fee.

We worked with a host in the Poconos whose extra person fees were tied to local regulations and resort requirements. By the time every fee stacked up, her pricing was so convoluted that when we compared her to other properties in the area, we couldn’t tell if her rate was even competitive. Guests search by bedroom count. That’s how they compare you. If your all-in price is out of step with similar-sized properties, they bounce, and they may never know why.

Ask yourself: with your extra person fees applied, is your property still priced competitively against other listings at your bedroom count in your market? If the answer is no, your cleaner’s pricing structure is running your business for you. Renegotiate a flat rate that covers the home, not the beds used, or find a cleaner whose pricing doesn’t dictate your rate. We price based on what the home can command in the market, not on what the cleaner charges per bed. If your bookings have been dropping and you can’t tell why, this is one of the first places to check.

Turn Off: Airbnb Smart Pricing

Turn off Airbnb Smart Pricing today. Airbnb’s stated goal is getting the guest the best property at the lowest price. That’s their goal, not yours. When you turn on Smart Pricing, you’re asking the platform that directly benefits from lower rates to set your rates for you. That’s not a pricing tool. That’s a conflict of interest you opted into voluntarily.

Most hosts using Smart Pricing fall into one of two traps. Some set a nightly rate manually and leave it untouched for months. Others turn on Smart Pricing, watch the calendar fill up, and read a full calendar as a win, with no idea how much revenue they left on the table getting there. Both groups think they’re running a pricing strategy. Neither one is.

A third-party dynamic pricing tool does a different job. It’s built to maximize what you’re making, accounting for your market, your lead time, your demand windows, and your comp set. It prices your property to capture the right guest at the right rate at the right time, which is exactly what Airbnb’s algorithm is trying to do once your pricing is calibrated correctly. Your pricing and your revenue belong in your hands, not Airbnb’s.

That’s the AirBnB settings audit we run with every new Strategic Host client, along with pricing, listing health, and the rest of your booking funnel. If you want that done on your properties, join the Strategic Host waitlist to see if it’s a fit.

Turn On: Professional Host Tools

Turn on professional host tools. This is where your Airbnb analytics dashboard lives, and it’s how you measure the health of your listing. Before you randomly change things when bookings drop, you need to know where in the funnel you’re actually losing the guest, because the fix depends entirely on the diagnosis.

Are guests not finding you? Your impression rate will show that. Are they finding you but not clicking? That’s a hero image problem. Are they clicking but not booking? That’s a conversion problem in your listing or your pricing. You can’t be strategic about a fix if you don’t know which one of those is broken, and you won’t know unless you know your numbers before you touch anything else. A PMS like Hostfully can pull this same data across every listing you manage, so you’re not logging into each individual Airbnb account to piece the diagnosis together.

Turn On: Instant Book

Turn on instant book, for all guests, not a filtered subset. The number one reason hosts refuse is fear of a bad guest. We understand the instinct, and we’re going to push back on it directly.

Airbnb has been telling hosts for over a decade that instant book matters, and every day it’s off is revenue left on the table. Most hosts still haven’t turned it on. When we ask hosts who’ve had a bad guest experience to do the math, how many total guests they’ve hosted versus how many were genuinely bad, the percentage is almost always small. One bad experience carries so much weight it drives a decision costing bookings every month after.

Manual approval has a second cost most hosts don’t clock. You start making up stories about guests you haven’t met, based on a name, a photo, a message. Instant book removes that entirely. You set your house rules, guests agree to them, and they book. If a guest turns out not to match your rules, say they bring a pet to a no-pet property, Airbnb will help you cancel within 24 hours, penalty free. You’re protected. And instant book gets a boost in search ranking, so you’re not just making it easier for a guest to book, you’re making it more likely they see you in the first place.

Turn On: Short Stay Cleaning Fee Reduction

Airbnb lets hosts reduce the cleaning fee for shorter stays. Turn it on. Even a five dollar reduction isn’t really about the five dollars, it’s a signal to Airbnb that you’re an engaged host using the tools the platform built, and hosts who use it get rewarded in search. It also makes your listing more competitive for one and two night bookings, which fill calendar gaps that would otherwise sit empty. An empty night generates zero revenue. A discounted cleaning fee on a short stay still generates revenue.

Turn On: Automatic Reviews for Great Guests

Turn on automatic reviews for great guests and put it on autopilot. The only reason to turn it off is when you need to manually write a review for a guest who wasn’t great. For everyone else, the automatic review does what you’d do yourself, on time, every time, without you having to remember. It signals to the platform that you’re an active, engaged host, which matters for ranking, and it helps the host community. When a guest is genuinely wonderful, other hosts deserve to know it.

Turn On: All Amenity and Safety Checkboxes

Go through your amenity list and check every box that applies. Then do the same in the safety section: smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, first aid kit, fire extinguisher. When a safety item is left unchecked, Airbnb flags it visibly to the guest, alerting them that your property may be missing a basic safety feature. That’s a deterrent. Guests choosing between two otherwise comparable properties will pick the one where every safety box is checked. Don’t give them a reason to pick the other one.

Your Settings Are Infrastructure, Not a One-Time Task

Every setting in your account is either adding friction or removing it, either signaling to Airbnb that you’re a reliable host or signaling that you’re not. There’s nothing neutral in that panel. Open your AirBnB settings today. It’s one of the fastest audits you can run on your business, and one of the highest return.

Inside Strategic Host, we help hosts get more nights booked, charge what their property is actually worth, and stop leaving money on the table. If you opened your AirBnB settings while reading this and realized half of them are wrong, that’s the exact conversation we have on the call. Join the Strategic Host waitlist and we’ll look at your business to see if it’s a fit.