Appalled filters are no longer working

[Blake82]

Filters are NOT fully working. When I set a filter, I want it to filter for a reason. Now you are doing this garbage of a maneuver: "Missing WiFI" - "Missing under $89" - "Missing A?C" -  After using Airbnb for over 5 years, I am disappointed that you are wasting users' time in order to sneak in more reservations in the hopes someone doesn't notice.  This is highly unfair and I am not sure why you are allowing this. Please stop, and revert to making filters do exactly what they should do: FILTER options. 

[Dale711]

Hi @Blake82 ,

Sorry to hear about your experience, and I understand you're frustrated.

In certain fact, Airbnb’s search algorithm considers more than 100 signals to decide how to order listings in search results.

Take a look at the links below and help you  to find out more Airbnb search works,

How does Airbnb search work?

What factors determine how my listing shows in search results?

https://www.airbnb.com/resources/hosting-homes/a/how-airbnb-search-works-44

Happy Hosting!  

[Blake82]

Dale and Dan, that link is of no use and nothing pertaining to my concern. 

I hope devs and/or superiors see this.  Search results need to be filtered properly when users apply a filter. The idea is to stop showing results that  a filter is set for.

If you were buying a car and selected you only wanted to purchase white and blue cars, but the search results keep showing red, purple and pink cars, would you be happy with the feature? If you were searching for a lot of land to buy and set your filter to 1 acre or more and nothing but quarter acre and half acre results were showing up would you be happy?

It's quite simple, please revert filters back to the way they should work. It's already bad enough I can not filter results by price or feedback, yet Airbnb has once again gone in the wrong direction hand have littered my search results with listings I DO NOT WANT TO SEE.

For a multi-billion dollar company, this should be a given. 

[Robert5843]

Hi Blake!   Blah-dee blah blah dee-blah. We are dedicated to your, glitch, glitch...  Please remain calm.  We are here to make your stay the most convenient to us, err, you, err.  Thank you, we apologize in advance.  Here is some information.  Please continue.   Have you tried staying in our algorithm suite, no accommodations available.   Enjoy your stay.   



...Blake -  You hit the nail on the head, good sir!  WTHeck??   It is ridiculous.  See you over VRBO 😉 

[Michael6483]

Yup - love the arrogance of Airbnb.  Perhaps incompetence in their abilty to fix what is clearly a flaw in the search function.  Glad I saw this post before we listed our properties.  Made our decision to go with VRBO that much easier.  Thanks Airbnb!

[Sarah977]

@Blake82  So you are saying that as a guest when you filter for say Wifi, you are getting listings come up which say specifically they don't have Wifi? If that's the case, that is really screwed up. Their programmers are constantly fiddling with things and making them worse or broken in the process.

I do know they try to get guests to book more expensive properties, though. One of my guests told me she had to keep upping the price parameters to about twice what I charge before my listing came up. As a host, that really makes me mad.

[Blake82]

Yes Sarah!

I am in Costa Rica and I have been searching for places with WiFi. It is ridiculous that I am having to now filter through search results for listings with WiFi as they now show me listings without Wifi. Airbnb puts in small text "missing WiFi" - This is unacceptable for a multi billion dollar company.

To the developers and superiors, please stop wasting people's time.  Fix this immediately. 

[Sarah977]

@Blake82  You need to report this to Airbnb customer service. This here is just a discussion forum for hosts and guests, not monitored by Airbnb in any real way.

Hopefully it's just a tech glitch they can fix, not something misguidedly purposeful.

And they are the absolute masters of tech glitches. They seem to have a new one every week, which makes things frustrating or impossible for either hosts or guests. And if guests can't find the places they are looking for, that's bad for hosts, too.

[Don79]

This is not an accident. It’s not a glitch.  It’s a way of changing filters to things that aren’t filters but still calling them filters.  If it was a “glitch” there would not be NEW text saying “missing. . .”.  It’s a huge disservice for both hosts and renters, but there must be some monetary gain for airbnb because no logical person would think this would be an improvement!  I know what I’m searching for and I want to find it quickly.  

My search for a property that has access to a gym only narrowed my search from 300 to 296 choices.  But when I look closely it’s because it didn’t filter the results at all.  By definition that is NOT a filter.

[Nick2343]

I know this is old, and this issue still exists, and it is EXTREMELY frustrating.

Here is your workaround.  Zoom out.  Continue zooming out until only listings that aren't "missing: xxx" are included.

It appears that when you are too zoomed in, and there are too few results, AirBnB includes listings that you want excluded.  This is poor UX.  It is an effort to garner more purchases, and I am sure that their data support this practice as users may decide, "well maybe a hot tub isn't REQUIRED" and select a listing without one.  

In my opinion, there should instead be a small notification on the bottom of the map if there are no listings that match the filter.  The notification should say click here to see 5 listings without xxx or something.  Or your filter is excluding these listings.  Something else besides this practice. 

It is beyond frustrating that their filters do not work as filters are universally accepted to work.

[Rosemary328]

This was a lifesaver!

[Matt4419]

Hi AirBnB team,

I am actually shocked news sites haven't written articles on this. This is quite honestly the most unethical thing I've ever seen, from a long-term user of AirBnB.

How can you justify creating 'filters', and then showing listings that do not match the filters? Very sad to see AirBnB go this way and will likely be moving to VRBO/HomeAway/something that isn't as scammy.

If you updated this and also turned on the availability to 'hide' listings I'm not interested in, I'd think otherwise. But this is dissapointing.

[Mary419]

It their new intentional design. It’s all about guests being “flexible”

There is a whole other post from a host about this and I see guests hate it too. 

https://youtu.be/w-kzCpHYK24

Brian talks it about it around minutes 4-8 there in the announcement video 

[Megan1089]

I noticed this issue today and it brought me to this thread. That video is infuriating. He literally says "Now with the filters, I have gone from hundreds of options down to 4. So I've overfiltered. That's a problem."

HUH??? Oh no I went from way too many options to only those that have exactly what I want. How tragic! It's almost like that's how filters are supposed to work.

No surprise the comments are turned off.

[Kevin2309]

Switch to VRBO. Their filters work.