I had originally thought they purposefully hid the forum when they made the change, so instead of 1 click from the drop down menu, it's now 3 clicks and you have to know what you're looking for or you would never find it....but, given the new search debacle....I'd guess they are simply that incompetent.
Still, I don't get it. Airbnb communicates with all guests and hosts by their platform, an extremely easy way to reach out to their stakeholds that would be the envy of most other companies in the world. They could EASILY survey hundreds of thousands of hosts and guests every year, even every quarter, gleening all kinds of useful information on preferences and using that to build new features. They could segment and survey guests and hosts in any number of ways, by country, by type of property rented, by size, by category, length of stay, frequency of use, by age, by family status. Airbnb's platform would be a marketer's dream and they don't seem to use it for anything.
But, they never do. It seems they sit around their brainstorming conference room in SF and come up with this stuff, then it gets rolled out, barely even tested before going live.
