I am a neighbor of an air bnb. I have used this forum many ...
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I am a neighbor of an air bnb. I have used this forum many times to answer questions about how air bnbs operate and hoping ...
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I agree that it was a bad idea to remove this handy tool. Unfortunately, I suspect that the reason was because relatively few hosts used it (and I'm sure they have statistics on this) along with a minority of guests. There's one fact that I know about utilization. I've had something like 1,000 guests in the last four years. Most of them received the check-in guide link, which I began using as soon as I discovered it, back in 2017. One cool feature of this guide was that when the guest clicked all the way through to the end of it, I would receive a message on Airbnb saying "<Guest Name> has checked in."
However, despite sending the link to literally hundreds of guests, I would only receive this checked in note once in a blue moon. Out of perhaps 600 or more people, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I received such a note, despite the fact that in the guide itself I specifically asked guests to go all the way to the end, since doing so would generate an automated message to me that they had checked in.
That means either that the system was faulty and didn't work well, or that almost nobody used the information as intended. So if the number of hosts here complaining is only a small subset of all hosts (probably waaaay less than 1%) my guess is that the IT department wants to pull out any extraneous clutter from our view and simplify things for hosts (who are perhaps less sophisticated than we are, the enlightened few, who are actually able to use such interesting and valuable tools) and make things easier for the larger number of hosts who are unable to figure out how such things work.
So if you miss the tool, maybe you should feel just a little smug and superior, because apparently you're in a tiny minority of super smart hosts who actually understand a thing or two about how all this works.
Or maybe they're just trying to figure out a way to minimize security risks, which can certainly be a real problem. We can only hope. In the meantime, I'm still able to use the link to my check-in guide, using the links that I inserted into the saved welcome message that I send to every guest. I'm just not sure at this point if a guest can actually see it, but I think they can. I hope they don't remove this information entirely , since it took me the better part of a day to take the various, carefully staged photos that walk a guest to the room, along with the six or seven separate pages of carefully edited written instructions.
I'd be curious to know how many people received regular automated messages saying that their guests had checked in. How many people really used the information as intended?
Don't get me wrong. I definitely miss having this tool, and I'm not sure if my current workaround is actually feasible, or will be over the long term. But I do understand the potential for security problems, and I suspect that the tool was severely under-utilized to the point that it was hard to justify having it so prominently displayed.
Maybe they could create a separate interface that would be available to hosts that knew how to use it; or a hidden suite of tools that advanced users could access but that wouldn't clutter up the screen real-estate for the inexperienced or non-computer savvy masses.
The one bright side that I take away from this is that the apparently tiny minority of hosts who actually used the tool are the best and brightest of hosts; the smartest guys in the room. So I'm doing my superior dance now, if only ironically. But it's not really a happy dance, since I miss this handy little tool.
