Let’s look at what was on offer in the first place.
1) Split bookings.
Here the idea is that if you want to stay for a long period in a particular locality (say a month or more) and you cannot find one place to stay, Airbnb will automatically show you two places that will cover the dates you have specified.
2) New search facilities.
Rather than just look for apartments or houses in the town or country concerned the site now has an option of going for more esoteric searches. The top line of search is now full of funky little icons such as “amazing pools” and caves or yurts.
3) Adverts of expensive properties on the landing page.
I’m unsure what was there before but I am certain I wasn’t getting offers for places cost £30K for a week’s stay. That is more than I have spent staying almost full-time on Airbnb for 2.5 years.
4) Erm … That’s it? I know … but that was all I could find.
So, what’s the problem? The problem was that there was so much that could have been fixed. Why can I not save my search preferences – so that I don’t have to go through saying what I am looking for Every. Time. I. Do. A. New. Search? Why is it that when I search for properties on the map I find it is obscured by the price bubbles so that I can’t see where I am looking? Why is it that the search will tell me when the property has internal stairs but does not tell me if there is a lift or stairs to the actual apartment – I can only find out once I have clicked on the link and even then I sometimes need to search the description or the reviews to be sure? And talking of reviews, why are they often not in date order with the newest first? I really don’t think reviews dating back more than 3 or 4 years are relevant yet they often come up before newer ones. Why is the translation tool so hit and miss? I could go on, but there is so much that needs fixing it seems odd that Airbnb seem to think that their new features are an improvement.
TLDR: I am not a fan of any of the new features!
1) With the split bookings. Who would want to move from one place to another within such a short period of time? Also the pairings don’t always work. For example, they paired for me a place with an elevator on the 6th floor with great reviews, with another apartment on the 4th floor without a lift. And with reviews which said that the place was noisy and far from public transport links. Again – it clutters up the search function and in the way they have organised it, I am unable to see what the prices would be if I was to go to each one separately, (instead of booking them together.)
2) This goes without saying … Some of them are rather funny. If I search for a beach apartment in Sheffield (which is about as far from the sea as you can get in the UK!) it takes me to the coast 200 miles away. Others have said that this is far from useful when looking for stays across a large area as you are forced to narrow down immediately. I can understand that if you put “Europe” in as a search factor it would produce so many results as to be useless but forcing people to used mainly upmarket criteria for searching seems to be pandering to those with more money (which I guess is useful for Airbnb but less so for the majority of users.) Which sort of leads onto 3) …
3) One of the properties Airbnb kept bringing to my attention when I went to their landing page was a lovely 10 bedroom designer home I could have for £37,000 per week. That is more than I have spent with Airbnb in the 3 years I have been using them. What am I supposed to do on my own in a 10 bed property? Even if I could afford it, I would not be going there. The current “landing page property” is one on a secluded island in the Hebrides, Scotland – which sounds lovely but also sound inaccessible to someone with mobility problems. It has a rating of only 4.71 with plenty of reviews, (I rarely stay anywhere with a rating below 4.8 unless it has few reviews and I can see there has been a problem guest) and the response rate to enquiries is only 45% which to my mind is unacceptable. It also has no wifi access which is an essential criteria in any search I make. Why Airbnb why? Now I know many people would think that this does not matter, just scroll past and walk away, but I guess from my gambling past I see something more insidious in this. Trying to bait people with luxuries they cannot really afford is one of the things that pulls people into gambling.
I remember seeing a movie some years ago, where the lead character who was hooked on gambling was asked what he would do with a big win. He mused for a while and said something like “well, I would buy a motorbike and travel all around China!” Now I am not sure if this was just said for effect, but I thought – “go and do that now.” The cost of accommodation and hiring a bike there would be a fraction of what it is in the UK and if you need money you could pick up a job teaching English with just your native language skills. If I need to stay in a particular place I can usually find somewhere cheap to stay and if not I can go to another nearby city (in some cases country!) and travel in from there … Where there is a will there is a way.
So what would have been my revamps that I would be talking about if I was in charge of the Airbnb website?
1) As well as having a “Wishlist” have a “do not want list.” One of the annoying things about the site is when I am searching for places to stay and I find unsuitable ones … there is no way to save them as “unsuitable” so when I do another search, the same ones come up again, only for me to go through the details (reviews) to see why they were unsuitable. I even thought of saving them as a negative wish list – but of course then the “heart” notification doesn’t differentiate, so I have all the ones I am interested in mixed with the ones I am definitely not. Surely it would not be difficult to put this in place.
2) Put the reviews in date order regardless of language. At the moment Airbnb tends to put the reviews in the order of most recent first (but not always) and then all the ones in your native language – but if the more recent reviews need translating then they come after the native language reviews. No problem if the host has only 20 or so reviews but when they have several hundred this can take some scrolling. A way around this is to click on the host’s photo on the listing where their reviews both as a host and visitor can be seen, which again is fine for host’s with just one property – but if they have several then it becomes cumbersome.
3) Make all the reviews translatable. At the moment it is only once you have read the reviews in your native language that the translate option becomes available and then (in my experience) it throws out the point at which you are looking so you have to scroll down again. Why not just have the translate on for all reviews. (This happens if you use the “click on host photo” hack above.)
4) Is there any way of making the listings more transparent over the maps? One of the annoying things is that Airbnb location maps can be completely obliterated by the listings themselves. I am not sure how this can be fixed – but I am sure there are some brains in the computing world who could come up with a solution.
5) They could be more transparent about the location. Okay, I get that some hosts would not be happy about everyone knowing exactly where their Airbnb is located, but sometimes the actual sites are very inaccurate, and sometimes it is crucial that you know roughly where you will be staying, not only to avoid dodgy neighbourhoods, but to ensure that you are on the correct bus route etc. I spend so much time working out how I can get to and from places and I am sure I rule some out because I don’t think I could reach them – so it would help hosts too.
These are just a few of my thoughts about the recent airbnb offerings – I would love to hear what other seasoned users think in the comments below or by sending me a message.
Comments
Thanks Steev, very helpful. I have used airbnb a lot for several years but am looking into alternatives: there’s one called fairbnb, which gets a much better ethical score from Ethical Consumer (14.4 compared to 8), as they donate to community projects.Having had just a quick look, they seem about the same price,but possibly not to extensive.
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