Check your Airbnb listing description

Out of sheer boredom yesterday I took a wander over to the CC, a place I rarely visit.

One thing caught my eye and that was the number of hosts who have had their accounts suspended by Airbnb, without notice for thirty days. Their crime was having certain key words in their listing description.

Incidentally, a thirty day suspension means ALL of your future reservations cancelled.

It would appear that Airbnb are scanning listings to pick out possible party venues, so the words “party” or “parties” and “event”, if they are contained in your description will raise a flag. The major issue, as far as I can see, is that they are completely ignoring context. If the words appears, no matter how innocently, you’re toast.

It makes me wonder if the CS staff overseeing this “project” are either target driven, i.e. they need to make their numbers, or that they are not native English speakers.

One host who regularly hosts totally legal wedding parties received this:

“We have determined they contain advertisement or promotion of unauthorised party or party-friendly space(s).”

Within twenty minutes or so of them challenging it, they received, from the same CS:

“We have decided to uphold our original decision and we consider this decision final.”

This was just last week, and there was one a few months ago in the US and several more recently in the UK.

The financial ramifications of this, for an affected host, are likely to be severe and reinforces the advice that you shouldn’t keep all of your eggs in the same (OTA) basket, if you can.

I’ve just checked our listings, even though I pretty much knew what was in them, just in case!

JF

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Good to know John, thank you.

I can understand that they want to cut down or even eliminate the party element but it’s weird that they are ignoring context. A cheapo programmer?

It’s a two fold fail I think, initially a poorly constructed script or algorithm, then what should be the human check in the process isn’t working, possibly for the reasons I mentioned.

Some of the folks on the CC got reinstated, but as far as I can see all their upcoming reservations were cancelled.

JF

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Yep, Airbnb seems to be on a scorched earth vendetta with their new algorithm. More reports of this on the CC this morning.

Host had listing suspended because they mentioned wedding parties, not in reference to them hosting weddings, but because they live quite close to a popular wedding venue. By “wedding parties”, they meant guests who might be coming to attend a wedding, not stage one.

Yet another good reason to make note of upcoming guests’ phone numbers and booked dates.

Reminds me of a short-lived experiment they did a couple years ago where they used some algorithm to pick out phrases in reviews that had been left by guests, that they highlighted at the top of listings. But because the algorithm couldn’t consider context, negative things the guests said were highlighted because of one word or phrase. Like “This place was a million miles from 'sparkling clean”.

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I’m wondering about those keywords mentioned by @JohnF that the algorithm is searching for.

Thesaurus page for ‘party’

I think my favourite is either shindig or soiree. :slight_smile:

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The problem is, I think, is that it is looking solely for those words. It is so simple to do a search that includes adjacent words, but you do have to spend time compiling your word list and the parameters it searches under.

Used to do this shit years ago, when scripting was relatively basic, compared to what can be achieved now.

JF

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Me too - in the days when we could easily fool search engines. :wink:

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How about:
Hoot-n-anny
Pig pickin
Congregating
Wine & dine
Cheer & beer

Some others please?

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Get together
Piss up!
Celebration

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My new favourite :wine_glass: :wine_glass: :wine_glass:

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144007484_1462592030601552_7414555805380637413_n

Just for you :stuck_out_tongue:

JF

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Perfect! :wine_glass: :wine_glass: :wine_glass: :wine_glass:

Thanks for the heads up. I think I may have something like “no parties” on my listing. Kinda scary that it might be flagged. (Although I’m not hosting at the moment, waiting to be vaccinated at least.) I’ll go have a look at it.

Here’s where I have to humbly admit my ignorance. What’s the CC?

(I get that CS is customer service, which I’m adding that to prove that I’m not completely out of the loop.)

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CC = community centre

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The CC is the Airbnb Community Center aka forum.

You can have No Parties in your house rules, just maybe try to reword if it’s in your listing description lest the bot think you’re inviting them.

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Just did my usual private page search, entire house filter appears to have gone. You now need to pick house style, mine is listed as a bungalow, couldn’t find it until I looked for bungalow…now changed to house!

Never a dull moment.

It is just silly - a bungalow is a house and house can be a bungalow! Poor new users who have no idea of house styles…

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The other day while mindlessly perusing the “Unique stays” listings, just for entertainment, I ran across one that was clearly titled, pictured, and described by the host as a cottage, but Airbnb had it categorized as a houseboat.

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And yet, Airbnb still has a yes/no toggle button for “Events Allowed” on the house rules set up/edit page.
Left hand, please meet right hand.

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