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Yesterday, I cancelled our last guest reservation for a stay with us in September. Our whole calendar is blocked, although our listings are published.
It was a bit sad to cancel the last reservation. It feels as if we’re out of the Airbnb (STR) business forever.
Maybe it won’t be forever, but it will certainly be until the pandemic is resolved, probably through an effective and widely available vaccine. We expect that to be sometime in 2021 or 2022. Hopefully no later. And we’ll stay isolated until that time.
I’ll continue to read the forum, but I don’t think I’ll have any new experience to report on.
Rubbish! You are a valued contributor to the forum, and the content is not solely guest/host related, particularly in these dreadful times. Please, please carry on contributing. You will have new experiences of a different sort, and sound advice/comment for others who are managing to carry on hosting.
I haven’t had any guests since New Year, nor would I have expected any until Easter, but I haven’t shut up, have I? The one booking I had for the Open Golf Championship has moved to next year, and that’s it probably for 2020.
I will still be a mouthy old matron!
I think It’s important to stay in touch and support each other.
This is very sad. I suspect that many hosts here as well as those not on this forum are taking a break or going out of the business. It will be interesting to see how our listings work their way back up to decent visibility when they are reactivated. Perhaps there will be such a reduced number of options that we’ll get back to the first page in our areas quicker than we think. It would delight me if Airbnb had an option of only booking repeat guests or letting us identify acceptable repeat guests. I would rent to people whom I know and trust before new strangers.
I have no idea why this is, but my search ranking used to be quite low, in spite of Superhost status and a 5* rating, because there are hundreds of vacation rentals in my small tourist town and I don’t use IB. But even though all Mexican hosts’ calendars are currently blocked by Airbnb, and have been since the beginning of April per directives from the Mexican govt, my search ranking has suddenly gone up quite a bit. Before COVID, I was something like #105 out of about 170 listings “in your category”- private room/bath for 1 guest, and now I’m at #68. I almost wonder if they have some kind of algorithms going on that identify which hosts haven’t balked or called up screaming at them about 100% refunds, or maybe hosts who received no 25% refunds and no Superhost grant $, or have bumped up those with moderate or flexible policies.
Anyone else who’s in an area where we aren’t allowed to book right now seen a significant change in their search ranking? Anyone have any other guesses as to why I’d be seeing this?
Airbnb hinted that they were going to do this for listings that switched to Flexible, but who knows what they actually did. We had a discussion about how if they increased the search ranking for listings that switched, they were at the same time punishing the hosts that always had Flexible. Maybe they realized that was an issue.
There used to be a belief that if you updated your listing it affected your ranking in addition to the things that you have mentioned. I used to change one word a day on each listing and I swear it helped. I have dropped from stopping IB.
Yes, I heard that to, and used to do the same. Change a couple words, or even block random days and then open them back up again, because supposedly any activity on your account bumps you up. But I never saw it make any difference to my ranking. The only thing that seemed to make a difference was getting a booking (my bookings are usually for a week-2 weeks, so they aren’t just constantly rolling in, like one nighters would)- then it would go up a bit for a short while, but then drop again.
And a German host who actually researched it pretty thoroughly said the only thing that really makes a difference to search ranking is using IB and being a top earner for Airbnb.
I’ve always had a good ranking for the bookings that I always got, lol. In other words, if you searched my town for the coming week I’d be on the first page. Put a few filters and I was often #1. But if you did a general search for 3 months from now I was invisible.
I absolutely believe that Airbnb rewards hosts who do what they want. Whether that’s refund guests, flexible cancel policy, instant booking, no problems, no calling about this and that…why wouldn’t they?
But I’ve been a good girl, really I have. Moderate policy, only once had a guest cancellation that wasn’t fully refunded, but the guest never asked for it to be, always polite to CS staff, even if I felt like wringing their necks, never, ever contacted them about a problem with a guest, never asked them to intervene except to try to contact a guest who wasn’t responding to messages, never filed a damage claim. I’ve probably contacted CS about 6 times in over 3 years- aside from trying to contact that guest, all the rest were tech issues, like my text alerts disappearing. All I can think is that it’s because I don’t use IB and don’t get constant bookings. Or that there’s just too many listings here. Plus when you look for Sayulita listings, they put Puerto Vallarta listings on there, too, which is really annoying and stupid. It’s an hour away, and they are two different vacation destinations. No one books in Puerto Vallarta if they want to holiday in Sayulita.
I am inland with 20 entire houses in our area.
When I do a private search there are 168 listings, including those that are an hour away at the beach. I search my town and it really annoys me that all these other - no where near - listings appear and the only way to see that they are not here is to view the map! New user would have no idea.
Good info. I suppose the impact of any factor depends on the density of listings in a host’s area. When there were few in my region I was always on the first page and changes just bumped me up and down the page. When the listings proliferated, I sometimes got bounced to the second page.
I did this today, and feel exactly as you do. I felt so sad for those final guests, who had already rearranged their trip (originally scheduled for May, and moved to September when the flight restrictions started) from the US to the UK in order to walk another length of the West Somerset Coastal Path. It had meant so much more than a holiday to them. Like you, I feel that we could be out of the Airbnb business altogether by the time it becomes safe to host again, but will endeavour to stay hopeful. Stay well, all.
