If you ask they will let you use the ‘reward’
It’s difficult to say what the problem is, I once had to snooze one of my villas for a couple of months and this villa was one of my most popular was always booked, When I opened it back up we were also getting nothing it was like it fell off the radar it to me ages to getting the booking flowing,
1 Like
I usually block about 3 months in the summer, when it’s too hot and humid to get bookings anyway and because it’s also when I take my annual trip to Canada and do whatever maintenance around my place that needs to be done.
I wish I knew whether it’s better to block or to snooze as far as search ranking goes, but I’ve never seen anything definitive on that.
There is just a lot more competition these days. Airbnb has been aggressively recruiting more hosts, and there are people offering classes on how to make the “easy money being a host 
.
Knowing what your competition is charging (and offering) and adjusting is about all you can do. There is a company (an app) called Beyond Pricing that might help you know the competition in your area.
2 Likes
And a lot of those new hosts who Airbnb keeps recruiting will disappear when they realize it is far from easy money. It really doesn’t make any sense to me to keep lowering one’s pricing to try to compete with all these other hosts. Race to the bottom is pointless- at some point it just becomes unprofitable to host at all. Unless a host is charging as much as they can get away with, rather than pricing based on one’s expenses and paying oneself a fair wage, lowering prices isn’t feasible.
Everything else keeps going up in price- utilities, gas, food, services. Why should strs be going down?
It makes much more sense to offer something other hosts don’t that really doesn’t cost you much to provide, spruce up your photo gallery, jazz up your description, etc., rather than keep dropping prices.
2 Likes
Also PriceLabs, Wheelhouse.
1 Like
I traveled to Phuket in October. You aren’t doing anything wrong … there are just sooo many options and the prices are ridiculously low. The current excess inventory (and competition) will eventually balance itself. Just try to separate yourself from the others through improved amenities, updated description, photos, etc., and wait it out.
2 Likes
I have no doubt, the platforms downgrade the visibility of your property if you are unbookable for a period. It’s their way of rewarding those that are consistently available
4 Likes
What I’ve noticed over the years, anecdotally, is that when guests were able to search without any dates not having a lot of availability would lower your search rank in a search that didn’t include any dates. It’s not only anecdotal because they included “the amount of availability” on the list of “what affects search ranking”, but I personally saw it work in practice. However, it’s been at least a year since guests could search without dates so that scenario isn’t relevant any longer.
However, both then (when guests could search without dates) and now (when they can’t) there’s no drop in search ranking if a guest puts in dates that you have available on your calendar. I have personally always seen the opposite in fact. If I have dates blocked and then open them up it shoots my listing to the top of the search ranking (for those dates). So it seems to me that unblocking dates gives a search ranking boost.
I’ve never snoozed a listing, I only block dates so I don’t have a sense of the effect of snoozing. Yet, I’d guess it has a similar or the same effect as unblocking dates because un-snoozing is effectively unblocking dates.
1 Like
I just searched without dates and it showed me the listings in my area plus those that are hours away.
1 Like
You’re not technically searching without dates. If you don’t put any dates in then the default is to search for “any week”. It’s not the same as when you could search an area and browse listings without any kind of time period or date at all.
So the search you did is showing you hosts that have weeks available. And since they want you to book asap they will show you places that have weeks available asap, so that tells me your area doesn’t have a lot of whole weeks available next week.
3 Likes
It doesn’t, we have a major sporting event on an I have been booked across all 5 listings since January
1 Like
Yeah, that’s why. And even if there’s only one single day or just a weekend that is selling out there won’t be “a week” available. We have Pride Fest this weekend and it’s a big one for the whole region so the same happens to me if I search without putting dates in (e.g. for “any week”) in my area. It shows me places in the next state (granted our state is very small tho).
However, I randomly chose Cleveland to do the same and it appears that they don’t have anything going on this weekend because the same search gave me a bunch of listings with “any weeks” available this week within Cleveland.
This is the same reason that hosts who have a max stay of less than a week won’t show up in an “any week” search which is not without any dates but as close as it comes now. Not sure if you remember maybe last summer there was a host in Washington that came here that wasn’t coming up and I figured out it was because she had a 4-day max. When she took it off she came up right away.
Personally, I don’t worry about it. I’m not concerned with attracting guests that are searching so randomly, lol.
1 Like
Im not one for dropping the rates I have a low season rate and that’s it, There is not much I can change with the description my photo’s are good, good reviews, tourism is down at the moment
Airbnb itself projected lower amount of bookings in the second quarter of this year:
“Nights and Experiences Booked will have unfavorable year-over-year comparisons in Q2 2023 as we overlap pent-up 2022 demand following the COVID Omicron variant. We expect year-over-year growth in Nights and Experiences Booked in Q2 2023 to be lower than our revenue growth during the quarter.”
Of course, that’s in aggregate; I’d expect great variation based on location, market, etc.
BTW, this is the weekly report I get from Price Labs about the market in my area. The ‘market’ shown here is not my competitors (I list 17). There might be a way to see ‘my real market’ in an aggregated way but I haven’t found that yet.
I had the same problem last fall. There was no reason that I could find. I tried everything. I had had no down time, was always a super host, my listing is very unique for my location so the new listings don’t really compete with mine. I tried tweaking pricing, changing categories, photos, updating the listing, contacting Airbnb repeatedly, etc. Eventually, I could only conclude that search algorithm changes had been made. The changes did not affect my neighbour’s listing but they affected mine. I only showed up in city searches far below other properties far outside of the geographic area. My bookings went from 90% Airbnb and 10% VRBO to the reverse of this.
Eventually, I made a new listing for the same property and it comes up where my original listing used to come up.
2 Likes
If bookings get reduced drastically like that , why dont you try getting promotion for it , increasing brand awarenss will do something… max 10-100$ you will get something
There is a misterious 6 hours delay!
I have also lost my Superhost qualification for a quarter year during Covid. I haven’t noticed any change. However (before and after that) sometimes I get the messages with a delay of hours. Now I get nearly no reservation for June, but inquiries with an exactly 6 hours of delay. I answer them with an apologie without any result. No response from Airbnb support team so I had to register on bookingdotcom, where I get 2-3 reservations per day. Interestingly Airbnb’s 3-hour calendar synch also has a 6-hour delay, so there is a 9-hour period when an Airbnb guest could reserve the same days after a bookingdotcom guest if I don’t make those days unavailable.
2 Likes