Listing not showing on the map unless…

[Jennifer3217]

My listing won’t show on the map unless I zoom into the area and then click “search this area”. Anyone know why? 

[Sybe]

Hi @Jennifer3217 ! Did you find an answer yet to your question? If not, perhaps this thread could provide some answers: https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Help/Listing-not-showing-up/td-p/388456

I hope that helps! 🙂

[Karl1128 · Accepted solution]

Just gone through this with AirBNB support.

thier response was “to be less invisible, you need to be more invisible.”

Basically, get your friends to give you bogus review to get more positive ones against your house/room. If you boost the rating of your house you will be more visible in the search of that area.

Pretty much got that throughout the whole month long conversation. Came from a supervisor in the “Help” department.

[Jennifer3217]

@Karl1128 Thank you, this is exactly the information I was looking for. Thank you for responding. It's unfortunate that it's this way, but hopefully with time, it will get more bookings and become more noticeable. 

[Sarah977]

@Karl1128  Get your friends to give you bogus reviews? No, just no. What a bizarre thing to say. That's the sort of thing that gives hosts a bad name as scammers and leads guests not to trust reviews.

New listings get a boost in search, and hopefully a host starts getting bookings and legitimate good reviews. Cheating with false reviews, just to improve one's search ranking, is not at all okay. 

[Karl1128]

Sarah977

I completely agree.

I had the same issue where my listing was not visible on the map search unless:

-Very specific criteria were entered into search

- map was zoomed into the exact block

My listing was even coming in behind other listings from a town 40kms away even when “incl surrounding area” was turned off.

Basically I was told

A) be LESS invisible

B) put link up on other sites (Facebook, Twitter etc)

C) reduce rate well below market average

D) rent to friends and family (strong recommendation even when the fact that neither BNB or I make any money on that one)

I have had a long running conversation with “support” about getting more visible even down to phone calls where I was told “I just need to get more reviews”

So by dissecting the information they have given me over the last 2.5 months. Either I give my house out for a significantly reduced rate to a stranger who will let their kids use my floors as a toilet (happened over this Christmas season, cleaning claim was rejected as I couldn’t produce “photographic” proof that the house “smelled” like a urinal), or I rent it out to a friend, who will look after the place, for free.

Im not the one who wrote the rule book. It’s the rules and lack of understanding of the system that allows for the rules to be bent to undermine the system and let’s be honest, I was kind of directed that way. 
And let’s also be quite honest, the guest reviews are also bogus, I’ve had 3 separate  5star guests turn into 2 star guests because others were afraid to give honest feedback and ratings.

[KandM-Premier-Vacation0]

I am in this situation now and it’s insane how frustrating this is. My 5 star home that has been booked solid for years is now not even coming up on searches unless I zoom in to my street on the map. The houses cities away come up but not mine. I was told the same line of bs. Get more bookings. Lol! How to do that when the house isn’t even showing up? No one zooms in on an empty spot on a map! 

[Sarah977]

@Karl1128  "rent to friends and family (strong recommendation even when the fact that neither BNB or I make any money on that one)"

??? No one can leave a review without having a booking. Even if you got family and friends to book via Airbnb and then paid them back, Airbnb still has collected their service fee, so yes, they make money on it. 

As for hosts leaving dishonest reviews, obviously that is an unacceptable practice and makes a mockery of the entire review process. I do a lot of cross-referencing of reviews if I have any doubts as to the believability of a guest's reviews. If a review just says "Great guests!" I have learned to dismiss it. If you check on how that host has reviewed other guests, you most often find that every review he has left for every guest says "Great guests!"

[Karl1128]

Sarah977,

Yeah, they make money, but what is the ~5% on a booking for $0.01. They only make their service fees from the owner. Significantly less than the ~5% they would make on a house that books for $350 a night (area average). But then once your house is visible, you can both start making money to cover your costs….

I completely agree it makes a mockery of the whole system, however, it’s not my idea. This is the helpful information I was provided by the team at “AirBNB support”.

To be visible, you need more reviews. To get reviews, you need to be visible on the search. It’s a catch 22 that can only be overcome by either fudging the system, dropping your price below running cost and hope that the people you get in aren’t going to abuse your place or just hope and pray…..

I am very diligent about reading guest reviews before approving them but another helpful suggestion made to me to be more visible is allow “instant book” which suddenly eliminates the ability to review when the guest has already paid…...

[Sarah977]

@Karl1128  A guest can't book for $.01. The minimum that a host can charge is $10. Granted that doesn't amount to much in Airbnb fees, either.

I don't know what you mean by "they only make their service fees from the owner".  That is totally incorrect. Airbnb primarily makes their money from service fees charged to the guests. This is why they are so guest-centric.

Only recently have they switched from a split fee system where the guests pay anywhere from about 14.5% to 20%, and the host pays 3%, to now offering the option for hosts to pay all the service fees (in which case the host needs to raise their price to cover that). And they made software connected hosts go to the host-only fee.

My guests have always paid from 12-14.5 % in service fees.

As for search ranking, no one is privy to their algorithm for that, which takes into consideration a whole bunch of things. The foremost is using IB. (which I will never do) I don't think getting reviews factors into search raking much, if at all-- getting bookings does. The things that up search ranking are the things Airbnb wants hosts to do to generate more bookings and increase Airbnb revenue. 

But it is definitely a vicious circle- if you have low visibility, you get less bookings, if you get less bookings, you don't have high visibility. What Airbnb should do, if I had my druthers, and what would be fair to hosts, is to rotate the visibility of listings daily so everyone gets a fair kick at the can.

[Karl1128]

Hi Sarah,

My point of this is that AirBNB told me to fudge it by renting to my friends to get reviews. I’m not renting to my friends at full price.

“As for search ranking, no one is privy to their algorithm for that, which takes into consideration a whole bunch of things.” The funniest thing is the help department doesn’t even know how it works. It took a friend of mine, who’s bread and butter is Internet sales specialising in “search engine visibility” to explain this to me. AirBNB themselves, told me more higher ranking reviews boost you in the search results as the results for search are based on Price, relevance and ranking. If you have an 8 guest house and that’s all you get rated on, that’s the searches  you will show up in. If you can spread the rankings/ratings to 2/4/6 guests you get more visibility on all search criteria.

Regarding price they can charge, yeah, they make a small amount and yes they still get to make something, but if the search criteria didn’t heavily rely on the organic search favouring most/highest ranked hosts you would not have this issue.

[Sarah977]

@Karl1128  What you have to understand is that when you say "Airbnb told me themselves", what that really means is that some outsourced, clueless rep who knows far less about Airbnb policies than most hosts do, told you something. That something could be something they made up on the spot, something they guessed at, or whatever. 

If you ask 10 Airbnb  reps the same thing, you will get 10 different answers. You can't rely on anything they tell you. 

[Karl1128]

Sarah,

Thank-you for the enlightening information.

The catch is, I’m using their “outsourced” contractors to give me information on how to make money off my house. 
If that’s what I am told, that is what I am taking from them to boost my earning potential, being this is the subject of this thread.

[Huma0]

@Karl1128 I am afraid that @Sarah977 is right. Many CS reps have no idea what they are talking about and barely know Airbnb policy. I have lost count of the times I have had to explain it to them and quote policy back to them.

As for this agent's suggestion to rent out to family and friends to get more reviews, did he/she mention to you that that's a clear violation of the Airbnb review policy? The algorithm can, and sometimes does, spot bookings with ridiculously low prices and suspend the listings. Airbnb policy is to suspend first and investigate later.

So, even if it is true that this is a way to boost your placement in the search results, the agent has told you to violate Airbnb policy, which could get you suspended or even banned, and your future, legitimate bookings cancelled.

As for what impact having great reviews has on the search ranking, that is questionable anyway. A while back, a bunch of hosts did an experiment which they posted on the forum. They were from different countries, but they decided they would all do a search for an apartment in New York, using the exact same criteria. 

Although there was some slight variation in the results, what was consistent was that most of the listings that came out on top had low ratings, some so low that it's surprising they hadn't been banned. Having a tonne of great reviews seemed not to have an impact and Superhost status most definitely did not. 

I have plenty of 5* reviews for my listings, but my bookings have never been slower than this year because of the Summer Release and its dodgy algorithm. I had way more bookings when I just had a handful of reviews (and I am talking about after the new listing boost had ended). Also, my listing which currently has only 29 reviews constantly shows higher and gets booked before the one with 119 reviews. My listing with 140 reviews consistently shows lower in the results than the other two.