[ben1040]

Glad to see a lot of people were able to book rooms there. I wasn't, but not for lack of trying.

I wish they would offer hosts more flexible controls for showing availability (and make sure hosts use them) so that people don't try to book places only to get negative responses from hosts who don't know if it'll be available at the time and to check back later. I was trying to book a place in SF for Google I/O and got a lot of responses saying that May is too far out for them to say for sure. It got pretty frustrating.

I don't have a place to host so I can't see what the controls exactly look like right now, but from browsing available properties it looks like the default case is that the place shows up as "available" unless there's an Airbnb booking in effect for a given date or the owner explicitly has blocked it out.

Given my experience searching for places, it'd be nicer if hosts had the option to say things like "don't show as available further out than X time into the future" or "default as unavailable except on specific days."

[Raphomet]

Hey, thanks for your feedback! We're continually working to improve the core experience on Airbnb, and we'll be fleshing out some updates to the calendaring system in the near future to address problems like this.

(I'm a backend engineer at Airbnb - feel free to write me at [e-mail] if you have any other feedback to pass along.)

[ben1040]

Awesome, looking forward to trying again when there's a little more clarity in availability (or when I need a place on short notice, because it looks like that kind of situation is where Airbnb really hits it out of the park).