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Generally speaking, I dislike nearly every change that’s ever been made to any app, mail hosting, software etc. wishing that “they” would just leave everything as it is, sort of… “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
However, it’s mainly laziness and complacency and once I’ve started using the new interface it’s not long before I’ve forgotten what the old one was like.
Now we’ve got this new range of features being introduced I’m wondering if any of you have pressed the button and engaged with it?
The "learn more’ notes say that once you click on the “early access” link there’s no going back
and my Luddite tendencies have got the better of me at the moment. Anyway, I am sort of curious, so if anyone’s already committed to the changes maybe you could let me know.
I usually like new things but I can’t really see the value of those features for me. (Although I can see how they could be helpful for some hosts.
I don’t have a co-host so those features are no good for me. Co-host messaging seems a bit strange when we have plenty of message systems on our phones anyway.
Earnings and expenses are easy to check thanks to online banking. And have very rarely checked local prices, apart from the nearest hotel, so I probably wouldn’t use that.
The first option shown and the last are interesting but I don’t like the idea of not being able to go back.
I’ve never had a problem with the Airbnb app or site but I’ve read plenty of comments from people who have so that also is factored in to my decision to leave well alone for now. Let someone else be the guinea pig. Now, if we were paid to be beta-testers…
I’m not opting in before I have to. None of those sound helpful to me.
I think some of them are available already, such as the pricing comparison. I did look at that, just for laughs, and I got them! The unbooked properties had the same average price as the booked properties, and they ranged from 1-5 bedrooms (we have three bedrooms).
The average was a lot cheaper than our home, but I know that already and that we are about the most expensive per-person 2+ bedroom property in our area. But we’re also a much higher-end property (views, amenities, services, furnishings) than our competition, too. ABB doesn’t take that into account in the “comparables”. Their AI isn’t smart enough.
None of those features are of interest to me. And does “the prices you set will include service fees” mean that Airbnb is going to hide how much they charge guests by adding it to our nightly fee, rather than showing it as a separate line item in a breakdown? So guests think all that goes in our pocket?
I would never opt for early access, as every time they do these updates, the hosts that opt for early access start reporting all kinds of glitches on their account.
@jujuba I totally agree with you- they love to constantly mess with things that aren’t broken, and when I started listing in 2016, the site was far more user-friendly. It isn’t just a matter of having to figure out where they moved something, which I resent because it is unnecessarily time-consuming, it’s that they don’t even have the respect to accompany site changes with explanations, like “We have moved XX to YY”, or “We have eliminated XX” or “What used to be called Stats is now called Opportunities”. You are left to try to navigate a new interface on your own. And the site is now so cluttered with stuff I never need or use.
It’s like they have a bunch of “ideas” people who have to come up with changes just for the sake of making changes. And they aren’t hosts, so have no idea what we really need or find useful or unuseful or how annoying it is to have to get used to new formats or features every 6 months.
If the picture they posted is really what it ends up being, then, no. They’ll just show you the total the guest will see.
Of course, I don’t have any idea how they’ll show a one-time fee when you set a price for a single night. If they are fair, they’ll divide it by the minimum-night stay you have set for that night and apply an asterisk explaining what they did.
But I’ll bet they won’t - they want to scare hosts into lowering prices, so showing a $345 a night rate ($150 a night, $150 cleaning fee, $45 service charge) will scare a host when the nightly rate would be $207 for their five-night minimum.
Airbnb’s wording so often turns my stomach. From the “Explore the 2023 Winter Update”-
“Which feature are you most excited about?”
Does anyone actually “get excited” about Airbnb updates? And the presumption is that we all get excited, it’s just a matter of which feature excites us the most.
I’m beginning to think Air has secretly be bought by the government! If it’s not broken, let’s fix it is typical govt philosophy, same as not explaining any changes they have made.
No, I’m not opting in for their early access, & I don’t get excited about updates. In fact, the updates kind of scare me, & I get pretty anxious waiting to see what they’ve @!¥%ed up this time!
I decided to try the early access because I wanted to play around with their mechanism for organising photos by room, creating a photo tour of the house by room. I just finished going through that new system and I found it was functional, intuitive, and easy to use. I also prefer the way it displays my two listings – it’s easier to get to them.
My only objection is that you can only choose rooms from amongst their list of options; I can’t create my own. That’s too bad, because the surrounding area of beaches in walking distance and outdoor activities are big selling points for my listing and I would have liked to be able to organise them by activity and beach.
None of the other new features are important to me so I haven’t bothered playing around with them. My co-host is my husband so the idea of using the Airbnb platform to communicate with him and pay him is hilarious, and I can’t imagine bringing on another co-host who I didn’t know well enough to communicate with outside of the platform. But I can imagine plenty of hypothetical scenarios where that could be useful.
I find the new update to be a bit of re-organizing the kitchen for the sake of. I watched Brian’s video about the update and it seemed… silly? He wanted to re-do the entire listing page because he thought it was too difficult to add amenities? Well it was never difficult for me to find the amenities page. Nor was it difficult to find much else. I find the most obnoxious thing to be moving the pricing to the Calendar. Since we have a third party pricing tool this has since stopped working as well as it should due to the change.
The photo organization appealed to me at first glance. I have not used it. Organizing my photos is a job. I have many. I am on a lake and a lot of the appeal to my guests is the outside. Any advice on using this new “tool”.
It organises the photos automatically, and then you go through and check to make sure it did it properly and move things into other rooms if they’re classified incorrectly. It really doesn’t take much time.
What I’m not sure is if you can undo it once it has been organised by room. I can’t see a way to undo it. So once you do this organisation of photos by room, I think you’re stuck with it.
Another weird thing is that I can’t see any way to control the order that the rooms are presented in. On my listing it goes: living room, kitchen, dining area, bedroom, bathroom, office, laundry area, exterior, additional photos. To me that seems a little counterintuitive; I would have preferred a different order to better show the flow through the space. But I can’t change it.
However, the photo tour by room doesn’t replace the splash of 5 photos that appears on your landing page – for me, those are still in the same positions and show a mix of photos from different rooms. But now I think I’m stuck with them in those positions, because I don’t see any way to change them in the new system.
Thanks lisanddavid, you’ve confirmed what I suspected…I’m going to leave early adoption well alone until I have to change.
I agree, these modifications are trumpeted as improvements but it would seem they are actually corralling us into more homogenisation and less choice as to how we represent our offer.
Expletive! The exterior is the big draw for our home - the views, pool, and gazebo. We have guests that spend 80% of their time at our place in the gazebo or around the pool - I’ll bet some would even sleep outside if we had beds there. Hopefully, their AI is intelligent enough to figure that out if I’m forced to use this.
Ah sorry I should have been more clear. There are lots of options for categorising things into the outside spaces of your own property, just no options to create your own defined space that’s not part of the property. So my pictures that went into the “exterior” category literally were the exterior of the apartment building. There’s no “views” category or “gazebo” but there is “pool”.
Here’s a full list of the categories that you can slot your photos into:
art studio
backyard
balcony
bedroom
bowling alley
childrens playroom (no, they don’t include an apostrophe, so they’re spreading bad grammar in the world, grr)
courtyard
darkroom
deck
garden
workspace
dining area
event room
exterior
front yard
full bathroom
full kitchen
game room
garage
gym
half bathroom
hot tub
kitchenette
laundry area
library
living room
cinema (why is this out of place alphabetically? I think someone originally called it “movie room” and then someone at Airbnb changed it to “cinema” but left it in M for movies)
Leave it to Airbnb’s ideas people to have a “music studio” and “darkroom” and “bowling alley” category, which I would assume are quite rare, yet no “views” or “gazebo”, which I’m sure are much more common categories for hosts to make use of.
