@Kirstie what makes Airbnb stand out from the competition is that the platform is broken and we can't rely on it.
I originally joined Airbnb on the recommendation of others and initially found it easy to use, good value (both as a host and guest), the platform worked well and we received a lot of bookings. That was in 2015. However I have blocked off the rest of 2017 and will stick exclusively to booking.com this year.
A few months back I had blocked off a range of dates on Airbnb where we had holidays, important family events or other reasons where I would not be able to host. There were probably about 30 individual dates and some weeks blocked off for 2017. It was purely by chance one day some time later that I went in to the calendar to check a date to find that every date for this year that had been blocked out had somehow now become available. I had to go through my paper diary date by date again to block them off and was seriously not happy to have to do this. If someone had booked and I had to cancel as a host Airbnb would have penalised ME despite the fact it is was their problem - they would never have believed the dates had previously been blocked off because they always believe the guest over the host as has become increasingly evident over the last year.
A few days ago we blocked off more dates via the laptop which has usually been more reliable than doing things like this on the app. The dates had been checked to make sure they were blocked off. But no, I looked this morning on my smartphone and all of the dates were available again and showing up in searches, even on the laptop where they were still showing as blocked off. How on earth can that happen? I had to block them off again, this time on the smartphone and it seemed to work and they didn't appear in searches on the laptop either. But I can't trust that if I go into the calendar next week the blocked off dates will still be blocked off.
For something like that to happen once is annoying. For it to happen twice is unacceptable.
But we shouldn't have to go through this grief. The only thing that Airbnb really owns is its platform. According to various online sources Airbnb pays its CTO at least $250k a year. I would argue that is money really badly spent because the platform s/he is responsible for is utterly unreliable. Surely the one thing Airbnb hosts and guests should be able to rely on is a reliable and consistent technology. But we can't as so many posts in the Community forum show. Airbnb constantly tinkers with the platform and everything appears to always be in beta, or only available to some hosts not to others as features are not introduced consistently to all hosts at the same time. That's fine in some circumstances but we don't seem to go a week without something changing and usually not for the better. And when we can't rely on the one major thing that a booking platform has, i.e the calendar, then it's just not worth the hassle and it's time to look elsewhere.
Basically all Airbnb is is a big database. With a database the data is the same whether it is presented on a laptop or via an app. Except on Airbnb where that isn't the case. Either the database is badly programmed and scaled or there is a second database system (or multiple database systems) handling app access and the synchronisation between them all just doesn't work.
Last year I contributed a great deal on the community forum but will take a break for the rest of this year and concentrate on the high number of bookings we are getting via booking.com even though it costs more. We know their platform works, they only introduce new features once they have been thoroughly tested and we don't have to put up with rubbish like blocked dates being made mysteriously available again.
