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You’re right I just saw it under the “rooms” category when looking in my town. Well, it does make the hosting of rooms stand out.
Sorry you’ve been dragged into this, but you need not add any private information. Saw one online with nothing personal other than photo and reviews.
Finally go around to reviewing my listing as it appears. Not tickled with the new version. I really feel that my husband and I host as a team. Requesting one full face shot in lieu of the couple photo that I used to have seems like a step back. I still have info about both of us in the profile. My listing also say “works in healthcare” when it is very clear in my profile that I am retired from that work for many years. Time for that long overdue listing re-write.
Two, simple enhancements would really help Guests…and maybe Hosts too:
Ability to SORT search results by price
Ability to FILTER for a SPECIFIC NUMBER OF BEDROOMS
You can filter for number of bedrooms as well as number of beds.
While we can’t sort by price we can at least put a price range. Sorting by price would probably hurt hosts with higher priced listings and I don’t know if many hosts here would actually favor that unless they are taking part in the “race to the bottom.”
If you filter for say 3 bedrooms…it will show you homes with 3+ bedrooms…meaning you might see homes with 6 bedrooms, for example.
it’s impossible to search for EXACTLY 3 bedrooms. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.
I know what you’re talking about. There is no way to see only 1-bedrooms (or any certain number of bedrooms). It frustrates me as well.
Exactly! Good to know its not just me frustrated by that…
I know how the filters work, I stay in Airbnbs when traveling.
I don’t see the need for it to filter for EXACTLY the number, but I can see that if that mattered to me it would be a good way to narrow my search.
I’d like to see filtering for star rating. I use the superhost filter but I get lots of results that are below the number of stars I want. And Airbnb wants to show me 300+ listings. Even with using every filter that applies and the map I get way too many results.
I haven’t done a search recently but I think most of the summer updates are an improvement.
Gotcha.
The point is…if I’m traveling with another couple and we obviously only need a home with 2 bedrooms…I have zero interest in seeing homes with 3 or 4 bedrooms - it’s just a waste of space and money.
For me, it is primarily an issue when I am looking to rent something “nicer” (some place we’re going to spend a lot of time in). Although price isn’t always indicative of quality, it usually is at some point. So a 2-BR that is $400/night is generally going to be much nicer than a 7-bedroom that is $400/night.
If you’re looking in an area with 1000+ places, it is necessary to narrow it down somehow. But if use the 2-BR filter and the price filter for $300-$500/night you end up with search results for a ton of huge lifeless, worn-out, low-rated places that sleep 14 people. You have to click on hundreds of dots on the map to find the really sweet 2-bedroom.
That’s just one example. And it’s foolish the way they do it. The code they use that makes it “2BR or more” cannot possibly be so much less complicated than code for “2BRs exactly”. It’s nonsensical that they don’t offer the option of “exactly”.
And I don’t usually use the SH filter. I’m most often, these days at least, searching in an area that is seasonal so most places are not SH because they don’t have enough stays throughout the year. I’ve also not had any better or worse stays based on SH or not.
I understand. I just haven’t had that experience. Maybe because when I travel alone I don’t generally search by bedroom and I often stay in what is classified as a private room or guest suite. When I search for a place for a group, I put in bedrooms and number of beds we need I get good results.
Yeah, I can’t compare. The only non SH I stayed with were 8-10 years ago and it was only because they were relatively new. I only search without SH filter if there aren’t enough choices with the filter on and so far, there always have been. I also haven’t had any bad experiences with the places I stay. My only complaint has been what I judge to be poor communication.
That’s true for me too. I just haven’t been traveling solo in the last few years (Covid has dictated a different type of trip) but that is a whole different type of search. Although there are some places with 4 private rooms in them choosing the “private room” filter generally narrows it down fairly well. And once the results are on the map, the pricing is a little more relevant because it is inherently more of an apples-to-apples comparison.
Btw, I like the new Rooms category thing a lot, with the host information highlighted. When I’m choosing a private room, one of my foremost concerns is “what kind of host am I going to be dealing with” so I think it’s kind of brilliant. What do you think of it?
It depends on the area you are searching. The other day I was perusing the private room listings in Mexico City, just out of curiosity, because Airbnb usually shows me a home page full of Mexico City listings.
Every single one, and I clicked on about 20 of them to read the description, turned out to be a hostel-type situation, with multiple rooms and shared bathrooms and communal areas, with no indication that the host lived there. (And many seemed to be cobbled together with plywood separating bedrooms, some with no windows, stuff that would never pass fire or safety regs in the US or Canada.)
I suspect one might find similar situations for “private room” listings in big cities in other non-first world countries, where regs are lax and what few inspectors there might be can be bribed to look the other way.
Of course. And it’s common in most large cities in the US for there to be a lot of the hostel types too (and I have nothing against them, I have a friend who runs one and it’s a labour of love). However, they are generally less expensive than rooms, in the same area, that aren’t in a hostel type place, so it’s still narrowed down by looking at the prices on the map.
Either way, it’s really very odd that you can’t filter by a particular number of bedrooms.
But that’s how most of the filters on Airbnb work, isn’t it? I read posts by guests complaining that if they filter for “pool” or “children allowed”, or anything else, the first places that come up fit those filters, and then all the ones after them don’t.
And one guest told me she had to keep upping the price range to twice what I charge before my place showed up.
Guests shouldn’t be shown any listings that don’t conform to the filters they input. It’s irritating to them, wastes their time, leads to guests who don’t read through everything thoroughly trying to book places that say, for instance, no children, when they have kids, assuming all the listings they are shown conform to their filters, and will lead them to book through other sites that don’t play these games.
The pool filter is hilarious. In the last few years I have always been searching for a place with a pool and half of the listings I am shown only have a pool table, and not a pool at all 
I really doubt that the crap filter software is a money issue, however if it is, I personally would be willing to chip an extra 1% on all my bookings just to get the filter for “pool” fixed.
I haven’t used it yet as a guest. I may be booking some more places this summer for a solo trip and look forward to using the new features.
I agree 100%. But Amazon does it, too. For instance, I search for “Cressi duke mask” (Cressi Duke is a full face snorkel mask). I get 1000 results, of which only 5 meet the search criteria.
I am sure this is intentional on AirBnB’s part. Chesky’s goal is to spread all the bookings around so the overall occupancy rate goes up and they get more service fees.
When I look for a property, I start on Vrbo. You can sort by price, guest rating, or number of reviews instead of accepting the default sort order.
For sure I think it’s intentional to some degree, and if it were just a matter of showing guests higher priced properties, or ones with more bedrooms than the guests need, I could understand. The guests can just ignore those listings. But when they are showing guests who’ve filtered for child-friendly properties, who then naturally assume the listings they are shown accept children, when they don’t, that’s just a problem for both the guests and the hosts, and I don’t see how it benefits Airbnb at all.
I imagine that at an early stage in the development of filtering etc, Someone showed a filter result with only 2 or 3 places. The ‘powers that be’ then made a decision that no matter what is asked for, it will show many many listings. As we see when your area is called up, it is always full of listings, even when some are 20 or 30 miles away.