Went into my listing to add/readjust my extensive photos. I have a unique property. In my eighth year with Airbnb. Always booked. I find that I can NO LONGER MANAGE my own photos as to arrangement, caption, etc. Some cubicle occupyer or clueless executive has implemented a MANDATORY PHOTO TOUR that uses AI to arrange and caption the photos! It is INSANE. I have a 265 sq. ft tiny cabin. It’s beautiful, has a kitchen, bath, dining bar, sitting room and loft bed. This stupid AI has ‘reorganized’ and re captioned my pics, with the heading ‘8 rooms of photos’…I don’t have EIGHT ROOMS. And then reorganized them according to ‘it’s concept’ of my property. I have professional quality photos (am a photographer) and extensive site and location pics as I want to bring in a specific clientele, and it’s always worked great. Now and then I add, and readjust the photos (for seasonal or other reasons) and now I can’t. what the HELL is going on? Calling them? they are clueless. Took me 15 minutes to just get the ‘agent’ to understand what was happening. Result? ‘we’ll have to call you back when we find a way around it’…Anyone else have an answer to get around this stupid ‘photo tour’???
I don’t have an answer but I have much the same problem! My photos have been organised into “rooms” which is OK, but on the Spanish airbnb site someone, or some algorithm, has put them in some random order which means the first photo a guest sees is of the kitchen - which is a shared space and only after consultation with the in-house host (me). On other countries’ sites the order is more or less right (first photo of bedroom, then view, which are my main selling points). Airbnb’s CS couldn’t get their heads around the fact that it looks different on .com from .es and could only suggest I delete the photos of the kirchen and see what happens! I am reluctant to do that. They are good photos and who can guarantee that the photo order won’t get rearranged to show the hallway first?
The only way that we can stay fully in charge of the way we advertise our rentals is by taking some measure of control ourselves. When we use a third-party company, we are at the mercy of any changes they might make and as a rule, there’s nothing we can do about it.
Unfortunately for us, it’s Airbnb’s website meaning that the company can make whatever changes it wants to at any time. (It wouldn’t surprise me if that is stated somewhere in the lengthy TOS that we have to agree to - and that no one actually reads - when we first start using the site).
We don’t pay to use the site, after all, we just pay Airbnb a commission when guests book. If we were paying a yearly fee to use the site then we’d be classed as customers which might give us a say in what goes on.
But we don’t pay to be on the site; Airbnb only gets money when guests book.
The only way to have control over how your listing is presented is to have your own website. This means that we’d also have to pay for credit card handling, for search engine optimization, other advertising to drive traffic to the site, site promotion on social media, hosting fees, domain name purchase and renewal and more, plus someone to do it all for you if you’re not a web expert yourself … for many people it’s just preferable to put up with the weirdness that Airbnb inflict upon us from time to time.
Well now 2 of my 3 bedrooms now have the same picture. Not sure what they did with the other photo. Guess they are trying new things to try and generate more business. It might also have something to do with S.E.O. ranking if everything remains the same. I am going thru that now with my business site we have to change and add content or lose ranking.
I’m having much the same problem … I can’t reorder my photos. It’s such a simple thing yet reordering improves the narrative of your listing. Mind boggles how this could be so tricky. I’ll try a different browser - Firefox and I’ll try a pc not Mac - does anyone out there have a work around? Cheers
I had a similar reaction to their photo organization.
In my case I deleted all the ‘rooms’ they had set up, and all my photos went back into a big bucket that I could organize the way I wanted to (the way it used to be).
The problem with this is that they’ve embedded the room count and bed count into this organization. So I wasn’t showing up in any searches that specified number of bedrooms or number of beds.
I didn’t see a way around this so ultimately went back to using the new ‘by room’ photo organization.