When (and how) to decline without hurting your listing

Good reasons to decline

• The dates don’t actually work — you have renovation planned, family visiting, or a pending sale
• The stay is too short or too long for your plans for the property
• You’ve already committed the property elsewhere and hadn’t updated the calendar

Notice what’s not on the list: hunches about the tenant’s profile. Every request comes from a screened tenant who has committed money — vague discomfort is usually noise, and discriminatory declines breach Spotahome’s terms.

And if the request is nearly right — dates a week off, price slightly apart — you don’t have to choose between yes and no: send a modification of the request instead. Keep the changes small; tenants can find heavily modified requests confusing.

How to decline well

1. Do it fast. A prompt decline protects your response rate; an expiry damages it every time. A decline does count against your acceptance rate, but far less than an expiry, which counts against both.
2. Give the real reason. Your reason feeds the matching system — decline “dates unavailable” and your calendar gets respected; decline “stay too short” and you’ll see fewer short requests.
3. Fix the cause. Most declines trace back to a stale calendar or unclear listing. Update both and your next request will be one you can accept.

The decline that should have been an accept

A pattern worth knowing: new landlords sometimes decline a solid 4-month booking hoping a 12-month one arrives next week. Run the numbers first — a confirmed booking today, plus a likely follow-up booking after it, almost always beats an empty month waiting for perfection. Spotahome’s average stay is about 5 months, and back-to-back mid-term stays often out-earn a single long lease. Declining a pending request and cancelling a booking you have already accepted are not the same thing.