Instant Book and booking requests

Each property decides whether guests book instantly or request first — the setting lives with the property and your direct-booking rules.

Requests

A request holds nothing and charges nothing. The guest's card is not touched until you approve — every "no charge until then" in the emails is literal. Approve and Decline are in the calendar's Booking requests review and on the bell, and both send the guest an email.

• Approve, and the guest pays from their portal link; the stay confirms on successful payment.
• Decline, and the request ends; any queued automated messages for the stay are skipped.

Instant Book

Instant bookings take payment at checkout and confirm on the spot.

The difference that matters is what happens to the nights in between. A request holds nothing: they stay on sale until you accept, so two guests can ask for the same dates and the faster answer wins. Once a booking is confirmed the database itself refuses to overlap it, so two guests can never buy the same night.

A booking for today

Under Settings → Defaults → Requests, choose what happens when a guest books for today:

• Ask me: it arrives as a request, and waits for you to accept it.
• Approve automatically: it's confirmed like any other Instant Book.

Same day requests stop time is a time you choose, 6 PM unless you change it, in the listing's own time zone. After that, the earliest check-in is tomorrow, and today is greyed out in the listing's calendar.

A listing can choose its own answers under Availability → Instant book → Requests. Until it does, it follows Defaults. A booking you type in yourself is never stopped by any of this; you're only warned.