Funny Story about Guidebook

Airbnb had been bugging me to publish a guidebook. I finally took the time to do it about three Sundays ago. It didn’t take long to put together the basics. Maybe 45 minutes. I have refined it and added to it since then.

On that Sunday, I started it with a listing for the largest and best-known museum in our area and then added quite a few other places.

And then, exactly three minutes after I published it for the first time, we got a booking from a man who was coming to our city expressly to vacation and spend days at the big museum I listed.

I think it was a coincidence, but I forgot to ask him if he even saw the guidebook online.

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I was just updating my guidebook last night and found that Airbnb has significantly modified the interface for editing the guidebook, and has lots of tags, custom categories, etc. now. But, as usual, it was buggy. Buttons to tag recommendations kept disappearing.

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That’s cool, @RebeccaF! I made my guidebook years ago, and it sometimes gets mentioned, but last weekend I had guests from about 5 hours away who took it on as a challenge. They went to everything I had listed!

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The man who visited us also went to nearly everything I had mentioned. Surprising to him, since he came here to see a large military museum, the place he enjoyed the most was a little nearby village with a historic liberal arts college—a place that still seems to live entirely in the 1970s.

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@Brian_R170, I found the interface surprisingly easy to use. I didn’t experience the disappearing buttons. But maybe I will sometime in the future!

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I have gotten the “local recommendations” compliment/badge from about half of the guests. I assume they are referencing the guidebook. I put all my favorite things on it, plus things I would never do but I know are popular with other folks, with my honest commentary, here is an example re: a popular restaurant:

(My commentary on the restaurants I would actually recommend is much more enthusiastic.)

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@LoneStar, you’ve inspired me to personalize the listings in our guidebook a bit more. Thanks.

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So glad to know there are other hippies at heart out there!!!

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