I constantly notice some minor changes in my listing: these changes may be small and seemingly unimportant - yet they are annoying, especially if they are not helpful at all but rather make a decent description from before more obscure and actually incorrect.
So I just stumbled upon one of those changes this morning: while before it said somewhere in my listing that there are animals (cat) on the property, it now shows up in house rules, as an extra point at the bottom:
I am annoyed because:
1.,) There are way too many of such changes, seems like almost daily. I like to have a firm understanding of my own listing, and where to find certain things in there, so to find such changes almost constantly and having to adjust to it, is rather irritating.
2.) these changes are always done without the host's knowledge, so one has to stumble upon them, as if by accident. As someone who takes care of her listing and how things are worded, I don't like the fact that I only find those changes by luck or by coincidentally looking at my own listing.
3.) If those changes were beneficial to the listing, to clarify things for hosts and guests alike, okay, I would just go with the flow and get used to them - but often enough, those changes made are not an improvement over how it was before, in fact they actually contribute to more misunderstandings about a listing:
examples:
a.) this new change today, "cat lives in the house" could actually alarm the guests: to preempt any kind of misunderstanding about where my cats are, I had to now put a clarifyer into my description, that the cats we own are not ever in the guest apartment. It was much better before, whereas it simply acknowledged that the host was a pet owner and that there was a pet "on the property".
b.) a few weeks ago, we had a change in the basic description, where suddenly Airbnb classified the lodging types differently from before. My listing was suddenly an "entire house" : no, incorrect - it is a separate apartment, connected to the house, but surely not the "entire house". I manually corrected it to "entire apartment".
Makes you wonder which brilliant minds come up with all these changes....
4.) A number of us hosts here are happy to help newer, more inexperienced hosts with something about their listing or their bookings: these constant changes only make it harder for us to extend quality advice and suggestions, as we need to constantly be aware of yet another change that came down the pike...
All in all: I wish Airbnb wouldn't spend their energies on fixing what ain't broke - but to put their energies into what truly needs fixing.
