I'd like to request the ability to make pending bookings automatically confirm instead of automatically canceling.
Or perhaps this would be easier to do as a completely different feature instead. Here's my use-case/thought process: We have a LOT of guests cancel within just a day or two of their reservation (our assumption is that they're booking multiple properties to make sure they're held, then talking to friends/family to finalize details, then canceling all but one). When they use Airbnb, Airbnb covers all the credit card fees, so it's no problem. But if they book direct, that means we either have to charge them a cancelation fee or eat thousands a year in card fees. We're afraid that if we don't offer any window for free cancelations, lots of guests just won't risk it and won't book with us at all.
So the functionality I'm envisioning is this: Guest books on our platform. As part of checkout process they input their card info and the processor immediately verifies it. Guest immediately receive an email confirming their booking and saying they have 24 hours to cancel before there's a cancelation fee. BUT, their card isn't actually charged until that 24 hours expires, thus we have no fees to eat if they want to cancel.
Currently we can sort-of-kind-of do this with the Request-to-Book feature. However, guests will be reluctant to book with us if they can't be assured immediately that they're locked in. Furthermore, this would also require us to manually review every single booking (a ton of extra work for us). Almost certainly we'd miss one here and there and guests would be very upset that their booking got canceled for no good reason.
