Lots of inquiries from other sites, none from here!

[Elsa15]

Airbnb is terrible! I havent had an inquiry thru them for months yet I am booked almost at 80% from all the other sites with every day inquiries. Im in a popular beach resort, second listing on their website, so highly visible. I noticed only 1 (one!!) potential guest looked at the house for May!!!! I own another house in the beach town next to it, had tons of inquiries and bookings last year, now zero! Booked at 75% capacity thru the other sites as well. Something is not right but what? I like Airbnb and wish for more bookings, but on both places, there is zero activity. Why?

[Monica4]

It is the opposite with me...I haven't had a booking from flipkey since January. Are you sure that your rates, including the Airbnb fee, are the same? Airbnb fees can be quite high, which makes the total price more expensive if you are not building this factor into your rates.

[Danny9]

@Elsa15

There may several reasons for the problems you have described.

Airbnb has undergone a change of limiting the search results to a max of 300 hits. This makes a lot of sense since hardly anyone is really going to look into the listing #985 and really book it, too. 

Unfortunately, while doing this, a number of listings have disappeared from the search results altogether. I have had quite some correspondence with Airbnb over the issue, and one of the replies I got was that the listing was going to be visible if the guests sought specific features such as a dishwasher in the housing unit??? Now, honestly, I doubt that too many people really start searching for a max. 2 guest housing unit because it has a dishwasher and it is their uppermost priority... 

Accordingly, I got no bookings at that period of time. 

I also discovered that the map that showed with my search results for Palma de Mallorca, Spain, showed well, Bloomington, Indiana. The explanation that Bloomington, IN must have been somehow in my cache is not really a good one. I have never browsed for anything in Indiana at all... 

I am now free to speculate, based on my experience that the Airbnb web designer team was going through some hard patches and that some of us got to feel this!

Actually, getting guests from various sources is a very good thing for any host. The more sources of income you have the less dependent on any particular web portal you are!

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