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.

[Lizzie]

Hello @Frances125,

Thanks for coming back to me. I'm glad to hear you are able to log in now and you have seen a home you like the look of. 

For your accomodation for Monday - Friday, when you have had a search on Airbnb.com, have you seen any you like or anything you are particularly having difficulties with finding?

(Also, just to add as you post is publicly visible here in the Community Center, for safety reasons, I have removed your personal information. If you would prefer to speak with a member of our Support Team, here is the UK number: +44 203 318 1111 and in general here is a useful Community Guide on the different ways to reach the team).

Thanks,

Lizzie

[Diodeth0]

Airbnb has the worst back-end administration of any website I have used period!

Totally counter intuitive. 

I received an email notification about a query a customer had made then following the link back to Airbnb I could not find any way of responding to the customer query!

Pathetic!

[Big4]

Hello @Lizzie

You seem like you are listening the frustration of not so much user friendly set up of the site. I am glad that we have your set of ears and may be at least some things could be heard via you.  I have been frustrated host from the day one of joining the airbnb community. My frustration is not towards airbnb itself, I have been happily hosting my apartment via using this company, but it is towards the website and application and how they are terribly set up. I read all the comments under this topic and saw that you would like us to pinpoit troubles, I am going to try doing that, however the problem is in the bigger scale, how it is all set up. So my number one trouble is about that:

1) Your interface is no familiar and simple at all... Navigating and what seems like multiple different interfaces for the same thing is very very confusing. The menu is jumping from place to place (no not when I am changing from hosting to travelling), some times it is on the top right, some times, it is on top left. Also the menu items are changing, and similar items are having sometime not the same contents or lacking contents. I can not emphasize how frustrating this is. I can not get simple information about my guest nor the information about my listing, and I always have trouble of finding them when I log in. My inbox seems always demanding something regarding my listing, which I already put information about, or out dated things, so there is always a warning dot on it.

2) Your translation for local languages are not good at all. That is why I am always trying to choose to navigate in english language but no matter how many times I choose english as my default language, when it opens up again, it is in local language where I am residing. With that said I cant say the website has terrible local solutions.

3) You say there are refferrals of fellow hosts, but did anyone in the airbnb crew try to do how that works. Can you simply explain how can I give written refferrals to my fellow hosts? I have to read the help center for a hour, for a simple thing as this and still come out with no solution.

4) In all my bookings from guests, there was always a glitch which guests run into, and asked in confusion. One in praticular, a group of guests tried three times to complete a simple booking with need of simple date changes. I almost lost them, and I dont know how many I may lost already due to bad navigation.

There are ton of more bad points to write about but when something is malfunctioning from the core, I dont see the point of doing, but I will try continue to write them about when they come up. However my suggestion is please try to look into your website and application in a whole and fix it, the goal is to make it simple to navigate and user friendly and I dont think that is something really hard to do.

Thank you for your time,

Best,

Big

[Lizzie]

Thanks @Big4, I am sorry for not seeing your message earlier.

This is really useful feedback and I am sorry you are finding the site not very user-friendly. 

In terms point 2. Can I check if you are changing this via desktop or via mobile? 

Thanks again, hope to speak with you soon.

Lizzie

[Seth60]

Hey Airbnb,

Are you aware of how bad the UI/X on your site is? I highly reccomend implemeting a feedback widget and getting some honest opinions.

From the horrible map view to the laggy interface - a billion dollar company should be able to put out a MUCH better website.

I've seen WordPress sites with better UI/UX lol

[Charlie175]

Oh where to start? The small print perhaps? Or the fact that when you choose their call back option [because you are having so many problems] they will call you 12 hours later at 1am and wake up the entire family! Grrrrr.

[Lizzie]

Hello @Charlie175,

Good to meet you. 

Just to check about the size of the text, I'm sure you have tried this already, but just to check. Depending on what type of desktop you are using, you can usually in large your page. 

For example, for mac:

cmd and '+' symbol together

Windows:

control and the '+' symbol together

This has worked for me in the past. Does this help?

Thanks,
Lizzie

[Charlie175]

Dear Airbnb

Please let me upload yet another photo that you have requested, and No I don't want the App thank you very much. I'm still awaiting my call back.....................

[Todd-And-Shantel0]

Airbnb is absolutely the worst website platform I've ever encountered.  Navigating around is completely cumbersome and the features such as sending custom rate to a booking request simply don't work.  The customers service is terrible.  I currently have two open help tickets to resolve issues.  They say they are going to call back and then don't.  I very close to pulling my listings from Airbnb and only dealing with VRBO.  Airbnb, you completely suck!!!!

[Asia22]

Yes this website is really made by monkeys ! I wonder how they can be so successful and how can people be stupid enough to book anything on it ? Just look at booking or hotel websites, they are so good and so clear.

[Yulia45]

Why? Why this site is so awfull?? In so many ways? in the world where there so many good examples? Was it designed by Airbnb enemies??

[Lizzie]

Thanks for your feedback @Asia22 and @Yulia45. I am sorry to hear it isn't more positive.

So that I can pass this feedback over to the right teams, can you provide more information around the difficulties you are experiencing and perhaps some ideas of what you would like to see.

Thanks again,

Lizzie

[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.

[Alex5919]

So my suggestions about problems making the site so un-user-friendly - two very simple things:

1. Sort by price! Most people buy things based on their budget. Whatever order your site lists search results in, there has to be an option to sort by price. Instead we have to trawl the whole list of results. 

2. If I search for properties in a town, I want to see results showing properties in that town, not miles away somewhere else.

Very simple, standard functionalities that every other accommodation website provides.

[Mark116]

Yes, it has become very complicated to navigate and really cluttered with Plus, Experiences, Restaurants and I presume soon to have Concerts, LOL.  I would wonder if a new user might not simply give up and go to bookings.com or another site that has a simpler format.