Applying for Airbnb Plus and / or a listing's category.

[Francesco602]

Hey everyone!

I'm Francesco from Italy and despite not being new to this community I haven't posted in a while.
I'm opening this thread because I'm interested in improving my actual listings and keep up with the new updates from Airbnb.

Categories

As you're all aware, Airbnb recently redesigned its home page by introducting listing's categories and I was wondering if my apartments already belonged to some of them. Do I need to apply to be shown up in the home page under a specific category? Or does Airbnb autonomously selects listings and puts them into a category that suits for the apartment? 

Airbnb Plus

Luckily one of my apartment is already enrolled in the Plus program, but as I'm sure that also the other one is eligible to participate in the program I was wondering if there was something to do in order to accelerate the invitation process?
If nothing has changed, Airbnb Plus is a program that requires an invitation, but - if that's still true - I'm sure there must be a way to tweat (in a good way) their algorithm. Is that correct?

I hope you can understand my concerns and I'm excusing in advance for any typos. 

[Anonymous]

@Francesco602  Airbnb has quietly taken its Plus program out into the back yard and shot it in the head. No more new entries will be forthcoming.

And the categories are chosen by automation, not by application. Supposedly, though, if you discover that your listing is featured in an inappropriate category you can contact customer service to remove it.

[Francesco602]

@Anonymous , thank you very much for clarifying!

Is there a way to check if my listing belongs to a certain category?

[Emiel1]

@Francesco602 

Both of your listings are in 1 category: Iconic cities

[Emiel1]

@Francesco602 

You can walk through the categories by using your personal link to the search system

(the "go to map" link on your homepage).

[Jennifer2513]

@Emiel1 Can you walk me through how you did this?  I'd love to be able to search which categories my listings are in.  thank you!

[Emiel1]

@Jennifer2513 

I noticed you own 52 listings.

Your homepage is:

https://www.airbnb.com/users/5723710/listings

Choose "go to the map" .

Then at the top select "1 guest".

Then walk through the categories.

As you can see on the first page:

28 listings are in category: "national parks"

17 listings are in "amazing pools

etc..etc..

Categories page

Please note:

- listings must not have set the maximum stay to less then 7 nights (1 week), otherwise they will not be included in display.

- Airbnb will show different photo as the main photo, mostly the one used for categorizing.

[Jennifer2513]

@Emiel1 This is amazingly helpful.  Thank you so much!

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It's really interesting to see how badly placed some of my listings are and how some of them aren't in any categories at all.  I hope Airbnb fixes these issues soon.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@Francesco602   How useful it would be if they displayed in hosts' dashboards which categories they're being featured in! But I'm not seeing a place for that, so it appears that you have to do the search as a guest would to see whether your listing appears in the category results.

[Sudsrung0]

I think it turned out to be a bit of a flop for airbnb, My condo was selected for Plus Property I wasn't impressed by the 2 clowns they sent to view my property to start with.

They took photo's inside the condo but not outside or of the pools, and you as the host cannot use them photo's, 

They kept on insisting we have a lock box outside the unit which is not allowed by the project and I didn't want to do self check in. 

In the end I refused their offer.

[Francesco602]

Thank you very much for all of the answers!