Airbnb 2022 Summer Release: What you need to know

[Airbnb]

Our 2022 Summer Release represents the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade. We’re introducing:

• Airbnb Categories: A new way to search that makes it easy for guests to discover millions of homes they never knew existed

• Split Stays: An innovative feature that pairs two listings when a guest searches for a longer stay

• AirCover: The most comprehensive protection in travel, included for free with every stay

Get all the details on the Resource Center, and tell us: Will you be updating your listing for Airbnb Categories and Split Stays? How will you update it?

[Annie1372]

Sorry @Stephanie ,

but ‘Homes in each category go through a curation process. Millions of active listings on Airbnb are evaluated using machine learning to analyse titles, descriptions, photo captions and guest reviews. So it’s important to make sure your listing info is up to date and complete’ … it does not mean anything 

a large majority of us does not find our house in the category they belong to.

is @Airbnb even did a pilot in that??

@Sybe how to see or find all the categories my house is liste on ??

@Emilie if AirBNB is choosing a wrong category, on which the guest based is booking. Who will ´pay’ for the refund.

[Brittany478]

I own a cabin. I have selected my property type under the categories provided by Airbnb as “cabin”, but my property does not show up when I filter by that category. It only shows under “house”. Once I select to narrow it by cabin it suddenly disappears from the list and map view. There is clearly a coding issue that Airbnb needs to address. 

[Asli2]

Dear Brittany, after all these months, has all your listing ever showed up in the correct category eventually? One moderator in one of these forums says that the category filters get populated with new listings every 2 weeks, so did your property really show up in the right category after 2 weeks? I'd very much like to know how long it took you to get picked up, if you ever did, your response is greatly appreciated. Thanks a million for letting me know. 

[Lisa34]

Hello! Like a lot of people, I have been following and participating in this thread for the past month. Now that Airbnb has a month’s worth of data under the belt how has it gone? What if any changes are planned? Can you provide any insights or updates?

Our region of NC still is not well populated in any of these categories though I know the properties in a lot of cases personally and know they should qualify, even with their current pictures and descriptions. When you use the categories search in our town it largely redirects people hours away to the Gatlinburg market, which is sad. We have a lot of empty calendars in our area right now during peak. Also, Expedia made an announcement that projections for the summer remain strong, and Price Labs is still cranking up our prices for summer to the max (though I have been overriding it to reflect our lowest off peak price and still have gotten almost no bookings) so it doesn’t seem to be demand. 

The default if you do not enter dates to a week usually in off peak seems to be a big source of confusion. 

Any insights you can share would be so helpful. Thank you for your time.

[Till-and-Jutta0]

@Lisa34 see the new update https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Airbnb-Updates/Host-questions-answered-Airbnb-s-Summer-Release/m...

[Craig723]

I agree with you completely Cathy.  My property prides itself in being 100% off-grid, providing full luxury services on solar power generation and rain water collection and filtration.  This is included in the listing title and in the description, yet we do not appear in the "Off-Grid" category.

I'm also concerned about the geographic search.  The Caribbean doesn't appear to be anywhere in the newly defined Geographies.  St Croix is a territory of the US, but we do not appear in the US grouping, and there is not one for the Caribbean...

[Asli2]

Hi, after all these months, has all your listing ever showed up in the correct category eventually? One moderator in one of these forums says that the category filters get populated with new listings every 2 weeks, so did your property really show up in the right category after 2 weeks? I'd very much like to know how long it took you to get picked up, if you ever did, your response is greatly appreciated. Thanks a million for letting me know. 

[Michelle3037]

The categories are not at all helpful. My place doesn’t even show up if someone searches Ohio with a hot tub!  WTHeck?  I have had a number of guests prior to this search engine change find me by searching the ENTIRE STATE OF OHIO. Best part is I message customer service and was told I was wrong. But I’m not and the thousands of other hosts messaging ABB should probably be listened to instead of brushed off. 

[Svetlana237]

Sybe - from AI perspective, how AI would even know that one listing has amenities complete and current? 

Properties are miscategorized due to "unsupervised" machine learning methods. It happens when big data gets fed into the algorithm and the Algorithm assigns properties into categories. But the categories can't be controlled and they are unknown. For all we know properties may be assigned to a category because of the specific color, or all of them have a door, or something else that the algorithm thought was "common" but not necessarily anything that humans can relate to. 

It is a very peculiar implementation 

[Susan1188]

@Sybe I am a 200 five star review superhost!
I have 4 beachfront properties in the same building!
Only one remains on the screen, when I tap "beachfront".  They are all next door to each other!
This is horrible - "improving your chances" of getting your listing recognized into a (TRUE) category seems so unfair!

[Asli2]

Hi, after all these months, has all your listing ever showed up in the correct category eventually? One moderator in one of these forums says that the category filters get populated with new listings every 2 weeks, so did your property really show up in the right category after 2 weeks? I'd very much like to know how long it took you to get picked up, if you ever did, your response is greatly appreciated. Thanks a million for letting me know. 

[Mark4150]

Machine learning isn't magic and it's typically only as good as the team that built it. Confidence in Airbnb's engineering and management teams is precisely zero at this point. 

[Kimberly718]

Sybe, I just can't understand why Airbnb didn't add the category tool as an enhancement in the form of a widget while maintaining the legacy of the original programming. The same canned answers too are all you get from you folks at Airbnb Superhost "Support".

They tell me to make sure I have my amenities checked and good photography as if I got 7% conversation rates and 5-star ratings because I didn't know how to take good pictures and write up an accurate and appealing description of my property. 

Based on the response from "support" (what a joke) our business is now in the hands of a bunch of techy's writing code so that their artificial intelligence can determine if my farm stay is in the Countryside and has Amazing Views and is my 300-year-old farm is Historic. Thank you Airbnb for not only killing my business in the height of the summer season but rendering me too stupid to know my own listings. 

[Emilie]

@Kimberly718 Sorry to hear you've not been able to get the help you needed from the Support team! 

I do not have more answers at this time, however we are capturing all of your concerns, suggestions and feedback on the Summer updates and sharing them directly with the product team - I've made sure to include yours as well.

As and when we get more information, on the points you're raising about Categories and anything else, we'll let you all know here.

Thanks,

Emilie

[Kimberly718]

Thank you Emilie,

The worst part is they are messing with our business which for many of us is our livelihood. When Covid hit, so many people stepped up and offered their places for workers and did their part to give back. In the midst of what was happening around the world, Airbnb rose to meteoric success with a product in the right place at the right time, but they didn't do it alone; it was on the backs of hard-working hosts like myself.

My business pre covid was running a design and marketing firm, and my primary clientele were 5-star resorts; Four Seasons, Hyatt, Ritz Carlton, etc. As you know, the travel industry was decimated, but people picked up and did what they had to to survive. For us, that was sinking everything we had to create a special place on an old farm and run it like I'd seen for 25 years among my core clientele in the travel industry. Airbnb was different; they gave "Small" a chance to compete with "Big." We hosts were doing what we loved, we had hit our stride, and we were not just surviving but thriving, enjoying what we were doing and meeting wonderful guests along the way. We were stylists, photographers, marketers, and creative experience curators. Then Airbnb gets "Big," really big, and so it decides to feed that big ego, and like the hotel valet that parks the most expensive and sexiest sports car in the front of the hotel, Airbnb parked the best, sexiest of all listings front and center and we "Small" independent, hard-working hosts now relegated to the mire of stuff that was deemed not so special were floating around somewhere else, considered too dumb to be able to properly tag our listings with accurate locations or descriptions. Our hearts were broken because we foolishly thought Airbnb was different from Amazon, Facebook, and Google. We thought Airbnb saw us as people that couldn't be replaced by Ai and that they knew that without us, they'd have nothing; nothing that they actually created, crafted, curated, not a single calloused hand. 0 product, 0 experiences, 0 heart, 0 loyalty. Just 0.