Hostfully supports Airbnb's extended availability window, so you can take requests past your booking limit

Hostfully has added support for Airbnb's Extended Availability Window. In plain terms, guests can now ask to book dates that sit beyond your booking window, and you decide case by case whether to take them.

This solves a real annoyance. Until now the choice was binary. Either your booking window stayed where you set it and far-out demand bounced, or you set the window to unlimited and accepted instant bookings two years out at rates you had not thought about yet.

Neither is what most operators actually want. The useful position is to see the enquiry and judge it.

How it works

With the setting on, Airbnb guests can submit booking requests for dates past your current booking window. Those arrive as requests, not confirmations. You review and approve each one before it is confirmed.

Your instant-book horizon does not change. That is the distinction that matters: how far ahead a guest can book without asking you stays exactly where you had it, while the window in which someone can ask extends further out.

To turn it on, go to Property Settings, open Channels and then Airbnb Settings, find Allow Booking Request and select "Beyond booking window", then save.

Hostfully frames the benefit as capturing more future demand while keeping control over how far ahead guests can instantly book, and giving travellers more ways to book without opening the calendar completely.

What it means for operators

The value depends on your property. If you run somewhere with a long planning cycle, this is worth switching on. Large groups, weddings, ski and beach weeks, anything built around a school holiday or an event with a known date: those guests shop early, often earlier than a standard twelve month window allows, and they have historically had to go elsewhere or email you directly.

The reason to think before enabling it is pricing. A request for dates eighteen months out arrives before you have a rate strategy for that period, and before you know what the market will look like. You can decline, so there is no trap. But you will be making a judgement with less information than usual, and the temptation is to accept a booking that looks fine today and looks cheap by the time it arrives.

A sensible habit is to treat these as enquiries to price deliberately rather than requests to approve or reject on instinct. Hostfully does not surface anything in this release to help with that, so the discipline is yours.

The wider pattern

This is the second Airbnb programme in October to reach property managers through their PMS rather than the Airbnb extranet, alongside the Optimize for Airbnb pilot that Hospitable switched on this week. Airbnb is increasingly shipping host-side features through connected software, which means which PMS you run now partly determines which Airbnb features you can reach.

Worth checking whether your own provider has picked this one up, if you are not on Hostfully.

No plan tier is mentioned, and no regional limit. The setting is per property, so you can enable it on the listings with long lead times and leave it off elsewhere.