A simpler Airbnb inspired by you

[Lizzie]

Hello Everyone,

As constantly reflected here in the Community Center, Airbnb hosts put an incredible amount of time and effort into providing great hosting experiences to guests. This make your time very precious, so it is important that the tools you use on Airbnb are accessible and easy to use.

Recently, many of you have shared ways in which the Airbnb website could be improved to support your hosting activities. It inspired a redesign of the website.

Over the coming weeks, you’ll see changes based on feedback from hundreds of hosts and that have been designed and tested in collaboration with the host community. Here are some of the changes you’ve inspired:

• Navigation is now consistent whether you’re on your phone or your computer

• Key hosting features and tools like messaging and the calendar are more accessible 

• Hosts who travel on Airbnb can now easily switch between hosting and traveling modes

For more information on what the team has learned from your feedback and how you have influenced changes to the site, please take a look at this Airbnb blog article.

We know how important it is to you that you are informed of changes on Airbnb and so we hope you welcome this information. We would love to hear from you, so please do share any thoughts you have on the process and what you think of these changes.

Thank you,

Lizzie

[Isaac35]

Hi

My name is isack,I do not know how to access the Airbnb,please help me how to manage the application.

Regards

Isack

Vamos Hotel Mikumi

[Jillian-And-Paul0]

Although I am hosting in Australia and travelling from Australia, whenever I go into the Airbnb app I find that the currency has reset itself to US dollars yet again. I have to go into Settings, press AUD and Save every single time. This is annoying and time consuming. I am not interested in my Australian travel being quoted in US dollars. Can this be fixed?

[Christine1]

@Jillian-And-Paul0,

Alcohol?

#: )

[Periena0]

I find the calendar is still a problem.  Today is the 5th time that I have gone in and had to block a booking that was made on another site for particular dates.  eg. I blocked out the Ed Shearan concert from 28 March - 2 April 2018.  I have done this 4 times & today when I went back to check another date I thought I would check the 2018 date as well. Would you believe it was still showing as available when it is not. I don't know what is happening, is it because Airbnb are changing their website around continuously & thereby it upsets the calendar??  I should only have to block off dates ONCE and then be garanteed that it will stay blocked until I want to change it myself!! Is anyone else having continued problems with their calendar?

[Ubud-Raya0]

Hay Warest greeting from ubud raya resort

could you please help me about confirmation letter by email.because i have guest check in at our hotel but we don't have booking confirmation from airbnb?

please call on y mobile number how to get confirmation letter by email from you> [personal information hidden]

Thanks so much

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

[Roberta180]

This is all great and useful, BUT airbnb does not seem to be addressing the need for a TAX line for our transcient/accomodation and local taxes to be added to the total with the other fees!! There are many of your locations where the state does not work with vacation rental sites on this, but still want their taxes. Airbnb's suggestion is to collect when they arrive (ackward) or add it into the total nightly price (which makes the nightly rate seem higher, so not good either!) Guests are used to paying this, added on at the total (with hotels, etc.) and it would help us out so much! We DO want to pay our local taxes!

There are several conversations on your site about this, but I have not heard airbnb address this issue. The fact that vrbo does it, shows it can't be hard to do! It can be added on the same way the cleaning fee and rental fees are. We can pay our local taxes, and still have our rate sound competitive. 

[Bud-And-Sandy0]

It's crazy here in Sonoma County CA. I include the 12% total tax in our nightly rate and then pay it to the city of Santa Rosa quarterly. It's not difficult; they send me the form 30 days ahead. On the other hand, the county collects those taxes in the unincorporated areas and just raised the total to 15%. I believe the hotels, in concert with the county and city, would like to put us all out of business.

[Pat-And-Mike0]

I use Safari as my browser of choice but it no longer works.

I would like that to be fixed.

[Val20]

@Lizzie could you please advocate for having hosts pictures back into search results page together with the property thumbnail? Why did you guys get rid of that? It helps put a face to a name, it makes the experience more personal, not so business like. 

[Lizzie]

Hello @Val20,

Lovely to meet you.

In terms of your question here, I will certainly pass on your feedback to the team, however I thought you might find it interesting to join the live Q&A session we are having here in the Community Center later today with the Director of Product, Donna Boyer - during this session, community members will be able to post their questions in the live Q&A thread and Donna will be online to answer as many as possible during the time. 

Thanks,

Lizzie

[Patti-and-Janet0]

Thank you for continuing to improve the site and platform.

I'm a host in Sonoma County (60 miles north of San Francisco). One thing I would like to see is when people book, that there are form fields to fill out where the guest states, for one, where they need directions from.

I have noticed that people's profiles are often wrong showing where people are from. For example: I see that Rose is from Maine. That leads me to think she is flying in. So, I ask her if she will need directions from the airport and other details that a person from another state might not know. There are 3 possible airports.  

It often turns out that they live now in the California. But then I have to ask them from which direction they are coming. Maybe Rose lives in San Jose but she plans to be in Mendocino (north of me) the night before she arrives at my place. Since I am out of the way and not in a major city (and GPS is bad the last mile), I try to make sure people have the best directions.

A few times I have had people who have canceled the last minute because they realized I have cats and they are allergic. I state it in several places that I have cats. In this case it would be good for there to be some sort of message for them to check the description for animals or steps or no TV. (A few poeple at the beginning gave me a lower rating because I did not have TV in their room even though it says there is not one.)

Maybe some will not fill in simple form fields or notice a message but it would be nice to keep some of the confusion down. I'm sure when people are looking at several places and then they return to book, they have forgotten info or confused places. A little reminder can go a long way.

Thanks for any feedback. - Janet

[Alice-and-Jeff0]

Look, this is a press release, a piece of "good feeling" communication about something that was rolled out MONTHS ago - without instructions, training, or updated Help Center articles.  Great, it feels nice that we are being told how helpful we all were in making this change - that it's something we wanted.  I'm really glad some hosts in SF helped determine what was a priority regarding host tasks and then a second survey was sent to understand that a Dashboard was needed.  Cool. Warm hug.  

What we are craving is not nostalgic rehashes of what is already done but

1. information (Here's what's coming)
2. Training (Here's how it works)
3. Updated content (Here's the new Help Center Articles that support this change)
4. Removal of inaccuate information (Here's the Community Center topics that will be retired or censored so wrong details are no longer searchable)
5. Scheduled roll out (Here's when you can expect the change).  
6. Feedback loop for bugs and issues (Here's where we get your feedback)

Sorry to be a negative-nelly, I recognize that Airbnb is really trying to provide us with some warm fuzzy when all the information on the WWW is pretty negative.  But we really need and should expect more from a company relying on us to create their business. This is basic project management.

[Annette33]

@Alice-and-Jeff0 , this is so clearly put, thanks! still, hardly any answers......

I was unavailable yesterday, but read over the Q/A with Donna, the product director, expecting some clear answers to interesting questions. Not so. I didn't learn anything new, just the usual, "we're looking at it", "thanks for your feedback", etc. never a clear yes or no, never a time frame. Very disappointing.....

[Bernard108]

Hello. I've been an Airbnb host for  nearly five years, and a superhost for 11 trimesters. So beeing able to answer requests and mails within minutes matters a lot to me.

On my MacBook, I still use a classic version of the Airbnb app for Apple which I have carefully avoided to upgrade, as I know it and like it.

For basic functions,as accepting a booking or briefly answering a message, the Android app (recently upgraded) I have on my Huawei smartphone is quite handy too, but of course writing long mails with a small keyboard...

But I'm still fuming with rage at having, some six months ago,  accidentally loaded one of the last "upgrades" for the IOS app I use on my Ipad when travelling, or just walking about town. It's a total disaster:

I never found access to the very convenient "Dashboard"; the "Inbox", very long to load, gives you mails in order of writing time, and you sometimes have to look back three months to find the last mail of someone arriving tomorrow; it's full of analphabetic hieroglyphs where plain text captions would be easier; extremely difficult to access my libray of pre-recorded messages, as itineraries... ; a very small writing window, which makes checking and correcting a message...

I used to like the very handy older version, and sometimes I've been able to find it, it must still be somewhere in my Ipad; but the worse thing is that, now that I have installed the new one, Gmail automatically opens that one when I'm trying to answer a mail. If anybody can tell me how to get rid of the new one (with fancy greenish colours) and reactivate the old one (red and white), I'd be gratefull.

So these days, when I'm walking about town, I just answer with my Android phone that I'll write more extensively from home, later; But when I travel, as I can't carry my MacBook in my rucksack all the time...

From Brussels, Bernard H

[Christine1]

@Bernard108,

Hi Bernard, thanks for your posting.

What I like about it is the way you relate how your experience with using your website and hosting tools is affected by your browser and operating system-OS. 

It's helpful to understand this becuse as you have demonstrated these factors can have a direct impact on user experience.

In your case, you became aware of the coincidence between an upgrade to software and a subsequent change to the way your site and tools worked.

Unfortunately when our software is set to automatically upgrade, the result may be alterations to the way our site operates, and not something that is initiated by Airbnb.

I recall a previous occasion when I resolved some website problems by changing my browser on the advice of Airbnb tech support. Unfortunately I had experiences similar to what you described, and it can be a pain, but at least I am now less surprised or distressed, when these hiccups occur.  

Having said this, it certainly is something that we could hope is factored into the development and rollout of any upgrades to the Airbnb websites we become  accustomed to using.

But the more that people like yourself, help others to understand these things, the sooner hosts can regain control of their hosting tools.

Best regards, Christine.

Growing pains......