New feature - what guests liked about this place

1

Has anyone else noticed this new feature that is shown to guests when they search:

2

Can you provide a link? And would anyone see this when they search listings? I’m not sure what you mean by “shown to guests”. Isn’t everyone a potential guest?

3

Yes, I remember seeing that. Wasn’t it right above the reviews?

4

I was an Airbnb-guest in Germany last week. When writing the host review I could choose those things.

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5

Yes and it shows all the key words that guests have used - cozy etc when guests search

eg

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6

Something I DON’T like is the link to ‘things to do in Miami’. I am NOT in Miami! I’m at least twenty miles away. The link encourages people to look at it and then decide to forget Fort Lauderdale and go to Miami instead!

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7

Ah, I see. thanks for the clarification.

8

when you click on a listing it will be up the top … and when you look at all the listings on the main search page it has them all up as well

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9

ah that’s good to know that its not just random words picked out

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What I don’t like is, my competitors key word may come up ‘close to metro’. That doesn’t appear in my listing, but I am close - 2 miles by bus. So a shopper could assume I’m FAR from the metro because it doesn’t say I’m CLOSE. Make sense?

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11

I haven’t seen this. Is it being rolled out gradually?

12

yeah it must be

…

13

It came and went on our listing. It was there for a while but has gone now.

14

I did two reviews for places we stayed last weekend in JAX and St. Pete, and both times there were those keywords to select. First time I’d seen them…

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15

I saw this some time ago, but it was different. And much better. I had like 8 keywords, and when you clicked one of them it directed you to the review in which the keyword was mentioned. Now I have only 2 keywords, and not linked to the reviews. One of the words I don’t even think anyone used it. This is weird. :worried:

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16

Back before, there were some no sense keywords grouped at the top of the reviews. When you clicked on that keyword it filters the reviews that have those keywords mentioned somewhere in the content.

This was having 3 main problems:

  1. The order of the reviews (after clicking on the keyword) was totally randomized. You could start seeing reviews from 3 years ago in the first page and current reviews at the back of the stack.

  2. The system wasn’t smart enough to understand that some keyboards mean the same (for eg, area and location) so you end up having a grouped of silly keywords like cosy and comfortable,

  3. The system tends to favor short and to the point reviews against the longer ones. I guess they do this to help the guest make his choice on a more quick research but unfortunately those short reviews use to be the ones that are the cold ones and they don’t sell your space very well.

In the new approach, Airbnb is trying to help the guest decide his place among some keywords define by our reviews and our guests. This isn’t the smarter way to do things as WE should be the ones who are in charge of telling how is our listing so we can define the clear expectation of what our guests will have. My guests use to have different opinions on the same subject. What will be the next step? Letting guests write our description?

I don’t like any of this features on where Airbnb is trying to play “smart” but they are actually a dumb robot. Features like Guest Search Preference, Smart Pricing, “Things to do”, etc. In general, those features are a result of a buggy algorithm applied to a weak data mining process. The results are usually terrible and use to hurt our business.

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17

You might have seen this. If not, you may find some humor in it.

https://www.ismetroonfire.com