Airbnb's website is one of the worst I've encountered

[Andrew76]

Has anyone else had a frustrating experience trying to navigate this website? It has to be one of the most counter-intuitive things I've encountered. You can't get easily from A to B, especially in managing the calendar. I mean, airbnb isn't a poor company. You'd think they'd put a few dollars into making the site easier to navigate, rather than making it just look pretty. It's getting so I hate coming on here.

[Iris198]

Terrible search functionality, misleading checkout, and unhelpful customer service. It was my 1st time booking and it took forever to find a place because you can't cap the # of beds. I only need 1 bed, 1 bedroom, and 1 bathroom. There's no way to search that for couples and solo travelers, which I would assume make up a significant % of their users. Checkout shows price with discount, yet I'm charged full price. Customer service insists they can't adjust.

[Sue655]

Thanks to all of you for confirming my first impressions of hands down ABB being the worst interface ever - both as a host, and as a guest - there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to how properties are listed when searching, other than perhaps an almost overt strategy to randomly push all/any hosts to customers, as others have noted, even nowhere near the areas interested in! Why no sorting by price, distance from Target position on map, why allow hiding of additional charges, why are guest ratings randomly sorted and not in date sequence - how easy would it be to offer the kind of intuitive use delivered by sites such as travago, with search by keywords and phrases such as 'near winery' or 'allows pets'? Why does the masterfile list of classifications of type of property vary randomly? In this day and age they is no end of expert user UI and UX experts who could get alongside hosts and guests and turn the ABB siteinto something to be proud of!!

[Sue655]

PS one for the developers!!! There is a bug in the guest search which attributes a completely incorrect price to a listing when viewed in the main search results grid (price is corrected when a listing is selected for detailed viewing, but this is too late if the listing has been passed over) - I wonder how many hosts have lost business by this bug alone? Also how come the price seems to have a rounding error - this is a fixed and definite number and should always be EXACT?

[Sue655]

My wife is not that technically literate and she just gets used to the interface on her Samsung tablet and then the dickhead programmers make another random change! I work in IT and I would confidently recommend Airbnb for the annual tomato or raspberry awards for supreme awefulness, which is just unbelievable given the availability of such good UX/UI talent around now.  From this forum I suspect that they may have been annual winners for quite some years!!!!!

[Big4]

Hi  Lizzie, I believe they are/ we all are, trying to tell you that how all the website's structure is problematic. When you are asking for a specific feedback about issues, you first need to have a reliable structure of navigation in place, but airbnb website doesnt even have that to build on. We are not enemies of airbnb, I profited from it for a while, but now I am very frustrated user, which no longer have any reliance neither on the website nor on your support system. I am a host feeling like this, how are you going to make it better for all our customers out there, I really feel sorry for this. It seems like airbnb is only riding the popularity wave, being the first comer to the industry, with empty promises and terrible website on hand without making any actually dinamic change to creating a better website. No need to be a fortune teller to predict the failure of such slow mechanism, failing to respond to many cries of its users on time.

[Sandra1642]

OMG!  The website is so bad.  I thought maybe it was just me.  Then I googled this and found all these comments so I know it wasn't just me.  I used it last year to book places in Munich and Italy and it was so much better  .Location, location, location!  Tha's what is important to me.  I wish there was an alternative company to use to book apartments.  

[Lawrence89]

Look, I love the basic service.  I've stayed in many places with nice people and love it. BUT the website!  The WORST thing about it is that Airbnb isn't honest with you about the location of the rentals.  When you search for, let us say, a place to stay in Portland, Maine, you should get results in Portland, Maine.  Then, yes, places in the surrounding area.  But Airbnb's website serves them all up to you WITHOUT your being able to see right away where they are.  There are listings in Portland and there are listings 50 or 100 miles away, and you aren't told which is which until you click on an individual listing.  It would be the easiest thing in the world to have the location indicated for each item on the search list, but they refuse to do it.  So, as far as I go, I'd hate to see them go under but I'd love to see them kicked in the teeth. 

[Jenny358]

Yes, without doubt it is the worst website I have ever used. I simply don’t think I can carry on using air B and B because of it. Full of glitches. My heart sinks every time I have to use it. Honestly - it’s beyond a joke. 

[Colin227]

Absolutely. It is a dog's breakfast. And their communications regarding pricing are opaque.

[Colin227]

This pasted from an email today: You could earn €874.00 (will be confirmed once a reservation is made) €1047. Apparently the last price is the €1047 the customer pays - but no explanation to that effect

It seems on our latest bookinbg enquiry we have five prices. The full price; the discounted price; the price after the Airbnb fee to us; the price the customer pays; and the net price to us given in sterling - even though the site is set for euros. All these prices appear at different places in various comminications and on teh website without explanation.. I have sought clarity from the support chat but they just disconnect me. 

[Nikola92]

If this was some poor amateurish site it surely wouldn't be so dreadful and awful. Hundreds of refreshing to get some important things done, thousands of useless steps, thousands of ways going nowhere, hundreds of time getting lost ... If there is at least one thing here that is nicely done ... please let me know.
I contemplate on that fact. The only logical answer why this is the absolute winner of unlogic and contraintuitiveness is : simply to force clients to spend huge amount of their priceless time on the site. I guess they managed to come up that it would eventually increase their money flow.
The absolute winner on the whole internet of disrespect towards their customers. Absolute winner. Hats off.

[Jonathon29]

The website is absolute garbage. 

[Clive65]

the website seems to make it really difficult to find what you want, they deliberately loose your seraches and i can only apprently pay in zlotys whole system is  just amateurish

[Matt749]

To anyone who uses air b n b as a hosting platform 

beware of the scam where people can stay in your home and report a false problem then do not try to contact you but contact air b n b and get them selves a free hotel.

and you are left picking up the pieces. 

Trying to call and get paid from the guest and then the outcome isn’t in your favor and you lose money 

there is a real loop hole in the booking  system 

also the support system is flawed 

[Anonymous]

So I will be as clear as possible. There system is built on an Android platform.

even though it is not mentioned when signing up, it is OS centric, if you don't

run Android it will not work as well, especially when dealing with support.

I was told by "help" recently that I needed to change my OS from Mac to Android

and ditch my iPad.

If you look at how the company deals with the decision you make, they are moving you to what they want, not what you want. After making a decision the website keeps asking if I think I've made the right decision by asking me a bunch questions afterward, "are you sure.....". This architecture is design in a very old school patriarchal manner, it's not about you and your client, it's about what they want and they are stuck not listening to criticism, the people that first built the site did not come from a service background, he came from the software industry.