Keep getting enquiries for dates blocked in the calendar

English Forum Community šŸ¤” Q&As: Ask the community
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Hello, can anyone suggest a way to help me manage the huge volume of enquiries I get? Iā€™ve successfully agreed 4 exchanges already for 2025 and I have no more availability. Iā€™ve blocked my calendar AND updated my listing headline to include ā€œFULL for 2025ā€ but I still get at least 2-3 enquiries for this blocked period every day. I donā€™t want to be unfriendly, but the admin of politely replying is becoming a challenge. I do appreciate Iā€™m lucky to have a property in a central location in a capital city which is appealing to guestsā€¦ is there a better way to manage this? All advice appreciated!

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Hello Annette. Did you activate the option to not be contactes on your unavailable periods ?

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Yes, I activated it. But people just ignore this and write asking for the dates anyhow! Two already this morning asking for dates which are already taken for an exchange & marked as this.

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Ok unfortunately no real solution for that except hiding your listing for a while if you donā€™t have planned exchanges. Members donā€™t see you have an upcoming exchange, the calendar for them is just in grey for unavailable

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Firstly it is great that you have such a lovely home that everyone wants to come and visit :heart_eyes: However I can totally understand that getting so many messages when you have nothing available would get rather frustrating. I appreciate that you want to send friendly messages but this is a good example of when the pre-written messages do come in handy. This would speed the process of rejecting them a bit. Or as Etienne has suggested it might be an idea to hide your listing whilst you have no availability at all. I have passed this feedback onto the product team.

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I have to disagree with the Ambassadors response. When HE implemented a fairly recent change where you can REMOVE dates from your calendar, I found it confusing and redundant because there already is a feature to mark dates as UNAVAILABLE. I donā€™t think other members find it intuitive either. When you select UNAVAILABLE (My home is already occupied outside of HomeExchange, or itā€™s simply unavailable for this period.) it turns those dates on the calendar to gray color. Marking it Unavailable should mean itā€™s UNAVAILABLE and should not allow the user to initiate a proposal involving all or part of those UNAVAILABLE dates!! Clicking ā€˜Remove this Periodā€™ reverts the dates to a non-color (white). Clearly, this means those dates in white are NOT AVAILABLE. So, what is the difference between Unavailable and Removing this Period??? Neither one should allow a user to select any of those dates. On top of it all, thereā€™s the checkbox where a member can say they donā€™t want to be contacted for any dates marked unavailable. If itā€™s marked unavailable, isnā€™t the member basically saying itā€™s UNAVAILABLE and, therefore, would not want to be contacted? It seems HE has 3 different ways of saying ā€˜hey, these dates are OUTā€™ but, in two scenarios, allows users to select them anyway. Sighhhhhh.

As for the Ambassadors suggestion the member can opt to ā€˜hideā€™ their listing to get around itā€¦.doesnā€™t serve the member well, because hiding their listing prevents members at large from seeing the listing and possibly wanting to initiate a transaction proposal for dates AFTER the not-available period or dates marked as available.

It shouldnā€™t need a work-around. Unavailable is Unavailableā€¦.PERIOD.

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