Guest search inaccurate

Our bookings have been down considerably so I checked our listings position as a guest by entering the town and flexible dates. The first one was a listing in my town, but the others that followed were in other towns some 50 miles away. Our listing never came up.
I moved the map to where our town was in the center, but no difference. I then used two fingers to enlarge map and our listing came up in second place.

In the past I have searched under town name and our listing always came up in first page, often at top.
Something sure has changed! Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Mine has changed greatly but I know that some factors have changed such as a lot more competition in-town, reducing from 3 to 1 room, etc. When nothing else changed in our listing and we found it falling back from first or second place, we found it useful to change little minor listing things daily and it seemed to help. Now it is very confusing because of the categories, guest favorites, etc. I’m not sure I’ll ever make sense of it again.

My experiences have been:

maybe five or six years ago I noticed the pins on the map, for three of our houses, were VERY in the wrong place.
The pin for one house looked like it was in the river. Another was about 3 miles off - on Main Street instead of on five acres.
Air CS said they used Google Map coordinates for the address. Well, no you didn’t.
But those houses rented OK for us through Air so it wasn’t an issue for us at that time - and it got back burnered.

Then, like two years ago, I noticed the same thing you saw. The second and third listings that came up first in search were almost always for towns upward of 30 - 40 miles away.
Air CS said it was the new algorithm. (I’d read about that and how it’s supposed to help renter-search.)
Air CS went on to say that the algorithm will learn and will self correct.
Well, no it didn’t.

The struggle is real, as the saying goes. :slight_smile: And you’re not alone in this struggle.

Jason
Pine Hollow Lodging

1 Like