What's Your Region?‌‌

Ann72
Level 10
New York, NY

What's Your Region?‌‌

I've long been intrigued if not confused by the Airbnb search algorithm.  Why do so many guests, like @Emilia42's guests, want to stay at my place when they are bent on going to a national park an hour away?  There are many, many Airbnbs over there.  How do they find my place after they've typed in "Acadia, Maine" in the search bar?  How much of the search was influenced by guests who mentioned it in reviews or keywords from my listing?

 

Turns out Airbnb, unbeknownst to me, assigned a region when I first started hosting.  I found out by going to Performance -> Occupancy & Rates or Performance -> Conversion and choosing "Monthly Report" in the upper right corner.  The Excel spreadsheet that downloads lists your region between your listing title and your currency.

 

This isn't all bad, I suppose.  But it does cast even more doubt on the "location" star rating.  If we can't control the location's search parameters, why should we be marked down on that score?

 

My region is Acadia National Park.  What's yours?

26 Replies 26
Mike-And-Jane0
Level 10
England, United Kingdom

@Ann72 Wow just Wow. I now know why we don't come up in searches of Derbyshire. We are in Derbyshire just West of Derby. Nottingham is some miles further East so why oh why are we in Nottingham? Now in US terms Nottingham and Derby are on top of each other but in English terms they are many miles apart. I wonder how one gets this corrected.

Sarah977
Level 10
Sayulita, Mexico

@Ann72  Thanks for the sleuthing. I'm going to look at mine. 

Emilia42
Level 10
Orono, ME

@Ann72 

Good discovery! My location is "Midcoast Maine" which makes sense in terms of geography. My guess is that the "algorithm" isn't too advanced. As the crow flies, your town to Acadia National Park is only 30 miles. But considering the actual driving distance, it is over 65 miles. Clearly, the algorithm doesn't differentiate between the two. 

Yes, totally.  Though I'm less concerned with how advanced the algorithm is than with why we aren't given some choices when we're setting up our locations.  Why keep it a secret from us?

@Ann72   Keeping secrets from us seems to be some basic principle re Airbnb 🙂

 

Like why is there nothing in our hosting pages since they revamped our dashboard for the zillionth time, saying how to access the monthly calendar view? There have been so many posts here from hosts looking for it and assuming it's just been eliminated.

@Sarah977  I was going to look so I could give you an answer, but the whole site is down.  What have you done???!!!??  😂😂😂

 

@Ann72  Oh, I have my tricks :-).

 

I just read on another hosting forum about the site being down, from an Australian host, so it must be system-wide.

 

They must be revamping our hosting pages again. 

 

It is back up here in Australia now - to my relief.  Thought I had been blacklisted and my account closed as couldnt even get into Community Centre to ask the question...

Dale711
Level 10
Paris, France

@Ann, 

My region is “ Île-de-France”, Parisian also name my region well know as “ Grand Paris” 

Inna22
Level 10
Chicago, IL

@Ann72 fun find! I am Chicago which makes sense of course. 

Alexandra316
Level 10
Lincoln, Canada

@Ann72 Thanks for that, but what a messy report. Do you use it for anything? 

 

My region is Niagara-on-the-Lake. Odd because that's definitely not where my place is located: it's quite a way away. It certainly explains why I get so many enquiries asking how far I am from "downtown" though. Downtown in Vineland is a set of traffic lights.  

@Alexandra316 "Downtown is a set of traffic lights" 😂😂😂

 

I clicked through to see what was in it and discovered that detail but I don't use it - as you noted, it's unwieldy!  I maintain running reports that give me annual data.

Kia272
Level 10
Takoma Park, MD

@Ann72  Very interesting. Just discovered I'm in the Pittsburgh region, although Pittsburgh is 1.5 hours away. It is the nearest major city though. 

On another note, I've always been a bit mystified by the performance metrics on AirBnB. I'm not really sure what "conversion" is and what they are telling me. I guess it's not of too much value if I don't understand it. I'm guessing that the basics are the percentage of clicks and views that convert to actual bookings, but ???. Not sure how I can change that within the parameters of the platform, especially if none of us know the secrets of the algorithm. Go figure...

@Kia272  I agree about the usefulness of the data.  Clicks and views converting to actual bookings are the basics and they're really all I care about.  I would use other data if it meant more to me, but it's murky.  For instance, are those numbers under booking conversion rate good or bad?  No idea.

 

Interesting article on some of the secrets:  https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/39/what-factors-determine-how-my-listing-shows-in-search-results