What are response rate and response time and how are they calculated?

Your response rate and response time measure how quickly and consistently you respond to enquiries and reservation requests. You can find your response rate on your Dashboard under Stats. If you're using professional hosting tools, you can find the response rate under Requests.

It’s most important to focus on your response rate, which impacts your Superhost status and search placement. Your response time gives guests an idea of how quickly they will hear from you, but has less impact on your host status.

Response rate

Your response rate is the percentage of new enquiries and reservation requests you responded to (by either accepting/pre-approving or declining) within 24 hours in the past 30 days.

If a guest sends you an enquiry – a question, or any kind of message other than a reservation request – via Contact Host, you’ll need to respond to the enquiry within 24 hours to maintain your response rate. If the guest sends you a reservation request, you’ll need to accept or decline within 24 hours to maintain your response rate.

The response rate to determine Superhost status is calculated differently and is based on your responses over the past 365 days.

Improving response rate

To improve response rate and response time, do the following as soon as you can within 24 hours of receiving an enquiry or reservation request:

• Accept or decline reservation requests
• Pre-approve or decline trip requests
• Reply to new enquiries from guests

Responses after 24 hours count as a late response, which will decrease your response rate and increase your response time. Your response rate can impact your position in search results.

Your response rate isn't affected by follow-up messages between hosts and guests. You don't have to send the final message in a conversation to maintain your response rate.

Response time

Your response time is the average amount of time that it took for you to respond to all new messages in the past 30 days.

Improving response time

To improve response rate and response time, do the following as soon as you can within 24 hours of receiving an enquiry or reservation request:

• Accept or decline reservation requests
• Pre-approve or decline trip requests
• Reply to new enquiries from guests

Responses after 24 hours count as a late response, which will increase your response time.

Your response time isn't affected by follow-up messages between hosts and guests. You don't have to send the final message in a conversation to maintain your response time.

More info

If you’ve received fewer than 10 new message threads in the past 30 days, your response rate and response time will be based on the 10 most recent message threads from the past 90 days.