@Kimberly718 I completely agree. Like you, we worked hard for our 5* Superhost status. Our viewing rate has also taken a huge fall since the newest update, in fact it's been the lowest to date. I'm sorry to hear it's been the same for you too.
The new 'categories' feature should have benefitted places like ours that aren't in a city centre, but now we're losing potential income because our properties are even less visible.
It also doesn't even work properly yet - there are at least 2 categories that we should feature in for our local area (i.e. beachfront, beaches) and we don't come up at all, even though our guesthouse is positioned on the sand dunes right in front of a beach. But places that have nothing to do with that category which are based in the city centre come up!
I contacted Airbnb about it and got an unhelpful stock response :
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"not all the property is included right now as the system is still evaluating all the properties from Millions of Hosts across globe.
...this is a new feature and Airbnb is still working on that to make sure that all listing will be included to the right categories.
...Just keep monitoring your property as Airbnb updating it here every two weeks to add more listings in each category."
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They won't manually investigate it either, instead relying solely on the algorithm. With the funds and workforce they have, I'm stunned they didn't take the time to ensure the feature worked properly before making it go live.
You're right about the homepage too. I think Airbnb has always been known as a platform where people can get unique stays, but they've gone a step too far. Most "exclusive" design properties on the homepage are wildly unattainable for about 98% of users.
