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Grrrrr. This unwelcome “gift” arrived on Sunday I think. I’ve just checked our listing (via Chromebook) as a potential guest, and found us demoted. Badly. We’re still getting viewed, up to 500 in the last 30 days, but we’ve also been lumped into a wider area. Usually this would be Dover but just now we were included with Deal, a popular seaside town about 6 miles away, with massive competition.
What to do, what to do, what to do?? I get the bit about having lost the newbie boost, but this is bizarre.
The search area has gotten larger here as well. Even when I select my city, since it is next two a major city and another well-known city, all bunched together, results include all three locations. I have also noticed that the fewer available places there are for your dates, the larger the geographic area that is represented.
Don’t think there is much you can do about AirBNB’s search choices.
As Susan said, there are limits to what you can do.
Remember everyone is going to get a different result based on their search history and parameters. I did a search for Dover and click on the map to zoom in. I turned on the superhost filter and your listings appeared in the middle of the first page. If I put the instant book filter on you move up even more. I put in the last weekend in Oct and private room and now there are only 4 places in Dover. People are going to be searching with certain dates and prices in many cases as well. Airbnb wants people to have more places to choose from so it makes sense they are going to widen the search area as the number of available places drops. It may be slow but you will still get quality guests who are putting some work into their search.
Thank you so much for all this work you have put in for me, and thank you too Susan. That certainly does make sense. Perhaps that’s why we had such lovely people here last weekend but I am really, really so bored, I’d just about welcome any run-of-the-mill idiots for a night or two. Well, until they left and I could have a moan… I’ve got used to being busy over the summer and I’m finding this sudden drop quite hard, both physically and mentally. There is only so much gardening I can do now the weather has changed.
I moved to using a channel manager, could not keep track of which guest was coming and from where, but just today was checking my local area, when I started 2 years ago, there were only a handful of hosts, am on the 3rd page now (superhost and instant book) there was about 17 pages in total. Last time I looked there was about 4 pages.
I’ve noticed Homeaway copies AirBnB and AirBnB copies Homeaway. Homeaway started a frustrating new geographic search where they include a WIDE area if there are not “enough” properties in the area the guest searches. They decide what “enough” is - I think it is at least 300.
I wonder when Priceline (seems to be Expedia’s biggest competitor) is going to buy AirBnB. I’m sure they have tried numerous times.
“Change your calendars every single day. Add a dollar or remove one. It absolutely works to boost your rankings.”
Hi, thanks for this one. I am giving it a go. anything to get higher up the ranks, there is a lot of competition in my area. Would you know if making other changes to your listing has a similar effect.
@Joan I just did this, too. Googled Dover Airbnb. I didn’t even zoom in or put on any filters and your listing came up 4th overall. Beautiful place, BTW!
How lovely to wake up to such positive comments. Thank you all. We do have Wheelhouse on, which makes regular tweaks but Himself will be doing more of this too. And the Airbnb threads are very interesting reading too. Again, thank you all.
