Why does my listing not show up in searches.

[Abrasha-and-Maria0]

Because we are new to hosting we wanted to start cautiously and did not allow "booking without requesting approval". We received our first booking fairly quickly.

After a week, and not receiving any other requests for booking we changed our setting to "guests can book without requesting approval".

While Airbnb tells us that "Hosts often get double the reservations when they let guests book without requesting approval", we still did not get any requests.

Not only have we not gotten any new requests, what is worse, actually much worse, when we search for San Francisco, Potrero Hill, (our neighborhood), our listing does not even show up at all! This does not look very promising, and I am rather upset about it.

Why does our listing not show up, even with a directed neighborhood search? 

What does show up, are listings at much higher cost than ours.

I am looking forward to help and clarification about this. Maybe we are doing something wrong.

Abrasha

[Steve143 · Accepted solution]

Hello @Abrasha-and-Maria0,

I searched for "instant book" "Entire home/apt" accommodation in San Francisco, Potrero Hill for the 19th to the 21st of November and your listing showed up in first place when I was logged in.

It doesn't show up in searches when I'm logged out. Did you search when logged out or when using an account where the owner of the account doesn't satisfy your instant book requirements?

If you have "Government issued ID" or "reviews from other hosts" selected as booking requirements then your listing will not show up in searches done by someone when logged out as Airbnb can't tell who they are and so doesn't know if they satisfy those requirements. It also won't show up to a logged in person if they don't satisfy those requirements.

Steve.

[Rowan1]

Thanks to you both. I have just listed my place for the first time, and AirBNB confirmed that it was published. With the url they provided I find my listing. However, when I search the neighborhood as if I were a guest looking for a place, my place is not there on any of the 17 pages for the area. What can I do to have my listing show up?

Many thanks, Rowan

[Sue156]

we are having the same problem, our house has been listed on airbnb for 4 years, bookings have been consistant and growing. Peak season is July August (ski season) we only have 1 booking this year, other years we have been booked out !

I had an acquaintace contact me as she wanted to rebook our house, she set 14 filters and our house still did not come up in searches.

Our listing is called  "Queenstown Stunning views"

hoping someone can help

Sue

[Robert776]

We are having a variation on this problem.  Our place is in Pflugerville and called

"The Little House in the Heart of Old Town".  If I log in and search for Pflugerville with Chrome I find it.  If I search with Firefox I find it.  If I log out and repeat, same result.  If my wife on her laptop searches with Chrome, she finds it.  If my wife searcher with Firefox, it does not show...  (If I do it for her on her laptop, I also don't find it...)

It seems like most places in our immediate area are booked up, but we get no nibbles.  If I look at how many views it has gotten in the last 30 days, it shows 12.  We are essentially the cheapest listing in a 5 mile radius in a very busy area.  We keep getting messages from AirBnB that Pflugerville is in high demand... 

We require people to contact us for approval, but other than that have no restrictions.

We currently have a booking, but if this continues it will cost us money.

[Matthew285]

@Robert776 I am not sure why you get different results with the different browser / computer combinations. It is good you are testing in different ways.

I see it on the first page when I zoom the map a little in towards Pflugerville. Yours was #18 of the 85 on the list.

By the way, I noticed for the one review this listing has that your guest left a nice review that had nothing but positive things to say.

However, your host response brought up a bunch of negative things that were not even mentioned in the guest's review. I imagine you were responding to the private message from the guest, but your response is public and makes what would otherwise be a completely positive review into a somewhat negative one.

[Robert776]

Matthew, thank you for looking into this.  I appreciate the effort.

I have investigated some more.  Here is what happens:  On Firefox, on my wife's laptop only, when one first does a search for "Pflugerville", our property does not show.  This is usual:  too many properties and hence not all show up.  Then I zoom.  No new properties show up.  In red, but hard to see since we all learn to filter out clutter, a notice appears that says something like "Refresh Search."  Clicking on this then pops up new properties.  After zooming a few times, low and behold: the property shows up.   So, the problem really is that depending on one's setup, zooming either automatically refreshes the search, or it doesn't.

Conclusion: the system works, but was not intuitive to us.  Problem solved.

As for the response you mention: yes, after posting the response I realized that the review that they gave was a private review.  It is not very intuitive to me what becomes public and what doesn't.  In fact, I still don't know when the score shows up or if it does.  And over time this seems to have changed even.  Naturally, we would prefer to now take that response down.  

What is still puzzling is that this property only gets 10-15 views per 30 days, in a very busy market.  We have another property in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania, where there is little reason for anyone to travel, and it gets 250 views per 30 days.

Anyway, we are learning!

[Komang-Pamela0]

Hi there, i have a similar challenge, my house is very close to Ubud on Bali  (3km) but when i search results for Ubud my listing does not show up. I can only find it on the map - when i go to my area. Other listings outside ubud show up. I have instant booking activated. Grateful for any ideas.