Our automatic e-mail response (reproduced at end) was not as clear as it could be (we will be correcting this), and Ston3Soup understood the opposite of our intent - we do not require four months advance notice, rather we do not accept bookings more than four months in advance.

We do this because Dupuy's Landing is not a hotel - it is our home. We like to have friends and relatives stay with us, and our friends and family don't plan their travels a year in advance, as many people who find us through TripAdvisor or other Internet sites do.

We are a very small scale operation, and because of the great reviews on this site and elsewhere, we get many many more requests for bookings than we can possibly accommodate. Lately it has reached the point where we can't even answer the many requests for dates that are not available or requests more than four months in advance. This is the reason for the automatic e-mail reply, whose original text is reproduced here (we will modify it clarify the advance booking restrictions, which are likely to change in the future):

Subject: Thanks for your inquiry

We appreciate your interest in our guest house; as a small establishment, due to the volume of inquiries, we cannot respond to all requests.

Please check our website [removed per guidelines] and especially the availability calendar:
[removed per guidelines] to determine if your booking request might be available.

We only take booking requests for guest rooms four months before the desired dates, e.g. August for bookings in December. Our guest house (guest rooms) is closed from the week before Christmas to the day after New Year's. Due to NYC law, we cannot offer bookings for our apartments for less than a month.

If we do not have availability for your dates we may not be able to respond.
Even if we do have availability, it may take a few days before we can get to your request.

We appreciate your patience, and if we do have availability, and your dates are within our booking horizon (four months for guest rooms, six months for apartments) we will endeavor to respond in as timely a manner as possible.

We understand that an automated response is not as helpful as one that we write to you personally, but we hope that receiving this e-mail will be less frustrating than not receiving any response at all, which, due to the volume of requests, was more often the case than we'd like.

We're sorry that we weren't able to respond to MagdalenaGarcia's reservation requests. As our automatic e-mail response indicates, we are not able to respond to all requests; in particular requests for dates that are already booked, or as in her case, requests for dates more than four months in advance. As noted in our response to another review, Dupuy's Landing is not a hotel, but our home, and we do not take bookings more than four months in advance, so that we can have some availability for family and friends.

We are not able to respond to requests where we cannot offer a booking, because of the volume of requests, and because we place the highest priority on communications with guests once they have made a booking with us, forgoing other possibilities. MagdalenaGarcia's first request was more than seven months in advance; her later requests were more than five months in advance - in all cases before our booking window. While it may have been disappointing for her, I have no doubt that she was able to find other accommodation in the city for her desired dates two and half months after her review, itself two and a half months after her last request to us. New York City is a very large city, and there are a lot of places to stay here - we are just (a very small) one.