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I’m having a hard time with guests finding my place. I have 3 entire house rentals in the same city (oak park, michigan) and one of these houses I also rent the rooms out, all listings have the same problem, very minimal views,high percentage of bookings, and 5 star reviews, so basically if they find the house/room it’s a good chance they will book it and be very glad they did. One popular city 2 miles away (Royal Oak, mi), the map shows result from the city and then a whole bunch of properties from 25 miles away (Detroit, mi) and my property that is 2 miles away is all the way to the back burner in page XX.I see no logic how this is helping the traveler or how those properties are more relevant than mine (granted I’m fairly new, houses have 11/13/2 reviews), anyone having the same issues?
Have you taken a look at the calendars of the competition nearby to see if they are booked? If not, it may have little to do with your hosting and all to do with the popularity of the destination as a common place for nightly bookings.
Some simple ways to move up in the rankings include Instant Book activation and checking off all the boxes for being Business Ready.
To put it into perspective I have a friend that is listing his apartment in Royal Oak (we are 3.5 miles from each other) and for the entire house for a month he’s getting around 100 something views and under 10 bookings whereas I compare that to one of my houses that has 10 views and 6 bookings, remember we are within 3 miles. In terms of rooms, my rooms are high end compared to his and about the same price and his views are in the 40-60 views, mine are in the 6-10 views, basically I would go out of business if I depended on airbnb, I also list on homeaway for the entire house and I’m visible there and get 70% of my bookings from there, so if people find me they book me but the airbnb search is not making me visible. I’m business ready and my rooms are Instant Book.
It sounds very similar problem that I’m having. Have a look at the thread ‘somethings is wrong with searches’. I’m also on instant book, have professional photos and good reviews. And it’s not possible to find my place for two nights in June, it just won’t appear in a single search.
If I narrow the search to a particular part of the city using an autocomplete function, I only get about 12-15 listings. Mine is not there. Most of the other listings are not on IB, have no reviews and have dark low quality photos. I can imagine people rather going to a hotel than choosing an airbnb listing in this case.
Can you find your own listing when you’re logged in? Search using different dates and different number of stays and go systematically through your calendar in May, June, July. The results are very biased when you’re logged in and your own listings normally come first. If you can’t see them, it’s very unlikely that they are visible to other users. The airbnb staff couldn’t find them either!
Same thing is happening for me on the app search and when I am in firefox I have even search for the exact suburb I am in and I can’t find my listing and I am a super host with 95% 5 stars reviews 33 reviews. Someone else in the facebook pages stated that it is a glitch for the summer months, but now with the new app it has gotten worse.
from my own testing I do appear but my problem is that the algorithm hides my property in the back pages (so not on the map) while places 25 miles away from the place they searched for are showing up consistently on the map (and I’m 3-4 miles away), right now I’m booked basically with returning guests, one guests that wanted to book more days said he couldn’t find my place with his mac, he had to use his phone (so maybe I do have a little of an issue like you guys). It’s just extremely frustrating people around your place getting all the bookings at higher prices and less quality listing. I booked nearby as a spy (well I had to leave the house b/c the entire house had booked) a room in a very cold basement for the same price that I’m offering a master bedroom with a king memory foam bed and 55" LED in the room with Direct TV, yes I’m frustrated lol.
That’s a major problem, I’m going to start testing in different type of computer/browers and see how I appear. My main problem is with the algorithm that airbnb has, it totally doesn’t work for my area and gives some results that really don’t make any sense, maybe I have a bit of your issue, one guest couldn’t find me on a mac but he could find me with his phone.
That’s how it is here also, if I search for the most well known tourist town, which actually has a ban on airbnb, so no one from that town shows up. Even though I’m just 10 miles from that town, it shows places that are 30-40 miles away first, some have no reviews.
Honestly I 'm tired of the search algorithm and I gave up with it. Really, even if I get the attention of someone in the support staff the algorithm will change in the next months and I will be in the same problem.
I’m maybe not so clever but I’m not being able to empathize with that concept that Airbnb promotes where they say that sometimes our listings are hidden from the search results (see the FAQs). Why?!! … Really, why we have to be hidden from the search results? Please send me to the bottom line if you want but don´t turn off my visibility. How does Airbnb knows that this current user isn´t the one who might probably want to stay at my place? And what about that 300 limit. Is it too short! In my area there might be more than 3/4 listing hidden from a regular search because of that ridiculous 300 threshold.
I just noticed this post on airbnb community forum “My listing doesn’t appear when I search for less than 3 nights”. That is exactly my problem. As Clare from air suggested to the poster, I removed my minimum stay and reset it. No effect. There is something wrong if air gives you this sort of advice. I mean the system should work without any removing and resetting the options.
Two days ago I got a reply from Air saying that I’ve got 24 hours time to report
them if I still have the same problem, otherwise they’ll close the case. I sent them all the dates when my place was available but doesn’t come up in searches. Now I’m just hoping that they’ll fix the bug soon.
At the moment my place appears ok in searches when I search the beginning of May but after that it can’t be find for two days.
This is not nice at all because I want to be booked well in advance in order to get a better price (which is still very reasonable). If I can’t do that then I’ll have to drop my price remarkably in order to get bookings.
I haven’t dared to test my visibility using a mobile yet…
This is my first posting on the forum but I’m so glad to find you all! I have been soooo irritated for over a week now trying to get some help from Airbnb regarding my ‘missing’ listing!! We just go backwards and forwards, I say it’s missing and the air rep says he can see it!! I totally agree with previous comments about 2 day searches not being available. I see my listing for a few dates in May but any 2 day searches after then don’t show. 3 day searches seem to work but that’s not the point because the majority of my bookings tend to be 2 nights. I just don’t understand why the ‘help’ team don’t or can’t do anything, I’m fairly new to Airbnb but I feel like this is never going to be sorted!!
Yikes, I tried doing different searches for my place also and same thing…sometimes it shows up, sometimes it doesn’t! I do have certain times where I have my settings for 2 day minimums. I guess the way to alleviate this issue, for now, is to remove that setting? If I do that, I’m going to put the time frames that the 2 day rental is minimum at the top of my listing though.
They are limiting search results to 300 in your large area?? Oh my gosh - I was pissed because they dumped up to 300 listing in my area and there just isn’t enough traveler demand to include listings that are an hour away. Now you are eliminated from search results if you aren’t one of the “chosen” 300.?
I just read the rest of the posts on here and cannot even bear to do more searches to find out the games Air is playing.
To the OP - yes that happened to me when I first listed. Air would not let me list under the “tourist city” - I collect lodging tax for the tourist city but I am outside of the city limits. I am centrally located to all of the attractions but they refused. At the time I listed there was one property listed in the tourist city. If someone did a search that property would show and then all of the rest of the properties were far, far away. I complained to Air and they just kept telling me that they go by mileage. Not true as I am one mile outside of the city limits. After a few bookings and reviews then I started to show up properly. But it looks like they are back to manipulating all results.
Yes Brook2adks, we have the same issue, have talked to about 6 people at airbnb and it was a runaround, some people did test over there with my property and saw the same problem, sometimes by chance it would appear (cookies maybe) but again I know my place is not visible because properties far away are showing up first, my house in a particular month had 10 views, 8 requests and 6 bookings, friend’s place in the nearby more popular city (3-4 miles away) had about 160 views, 6 requests and 4 bookings… Airbnb is basically saying get reviews up, market with facebook, superhost, etc, etc, so basically going around the problem, the problem is not the status of the host (maybe in the future I will make a killing when I have 10 times the reviews and by chance the algorithm will appoint me worthy of high result), it’s the results that there’s no way that it would benefit the traveler but airbnb can’t explain the reasoning of the results other than the hogwash that a lot of “info” is going into them. The last guy I talked to said that they’re talking about a “location” based algorithm, reallyyyyyy??? Isn’t the search supposed to be built inherently with high location significance??? The only thing I can think of is that it’s a profit based algorithm otherwise it wouldn’t make sense the results I’m seeing.
I saw this post on the airbnb host community forum. Someone has been told that airbnb is doing some sort of testing (again) and that’s the reason why certain listings won’t come up in searches. It’s absolutely impossible to know if this is the case or if they have a bug in their system. At least the IT staff of the customer support didn’t seem to be aware of any such testing and did a lot of work when trying to find a bug. Airbnb doesn’t seem to be very open in anything they do, not even inside the company.
My page views have dropped to the level of January-Ferbruary and I’m not getting bookings as most of my guests stay only for two nights. And the bookings I manage to get are at cheaper price. I can’t set my normal price if I’m booked only a few days in advance. I’m loosing money because Airbnb is using hosts as guinea pigs. This is frustrating.
I totaly agree with you guys, im a super host witha all five stars ratings and i have done all the things that have to be done, but my listing is showing so badly, on the other side booking.com have nice ranking sistem that shows beter hosts first, im looking every day where is the problem and why listngs with bed ratings and coments shows before mine. If anyone have any new knowledge please share…
So I cannot now find my listing and it was there a few weeks ago. I do acknowledge that at present I do not have any open calendar days but this was the case a few weeks ago as well as all winter. Did Air just change policy and decide to now show properties with any open dates? The reason I do not open the calendar is that we wait to say the Monday before a weekend that we want to host and then open it up for that weekend only. We almost always get a guest reservation within 24hours. Thanks, Curt
