20 Apr Sharing your unique hospitality with well matched guests
As an Airbnb host, you’re redefining what people expect when they think of hospitality. You show travelers that hospitality isn’t just about a place to sleep, it’s about going somewhere new and living there from the moment they arrive. We’ve launched a new campaign that captures this unique, authentic experience you provide. We want to share it with the world so we can bring more guests into our community—and into your home. Along with this campaign, we’re rolling out some changes to make it easier for you to provide great experiences for your guests.
Host controls
We’re launching new controls for hosts to help make sure the right guests see your listing. For common preferences like Is the home pet-friendly? or Is smoking allowed? you’ll have the option to set Yes or No.
- We’re making these settings and your house rules prominent when a guest requests a reservation or instantly books your space so they can review your rules and restrictions
- Guests will explicitly agree to your rules before they can book
- We’ll ask them to confirm the total number of guests who are coming
Personalized matches
We’re pairing these new settings with a redesigned traveler experience that we’re gradually rolling out on the Airbnb mobile app. We’ll ask guests for more up-front information so they can see personalized matches when they search. Now if you set a control that says you don’t allow pets, guests traveling with pets will be less likely to contact you.
We’re continuously learning more about guests, their preferences, and which homes they’ve reviewed highly. We use this information to personalize search results—which are different for each guest. We’ve been developing this approach to improve matching and ultimately increase the average number of bookings per host.
Neighborhoods and Guidebooks
To help guests understand what it will feel like to live in their destination—and to help them have the right expectations before they arrive—we’re rolling out updated city and neighborhood content for popular travel locations. We’ve talked to hundreds of hosts to create inviting local descriptions paired with beautiful photographs.
- In popular travel destinations, travelers can use the new mobile experience to pick the type of neighborhood they want to stay in, based on categories like quiet or scenic and these preferences will inform their matches
- The city descriptions now also include new collaborative guidebooks that gather local hosts’ recommendations for their neighborhood
- Whenever your guests open the Airbnb app during their stay, they’ll have a link straight to your personal guidebook
We believe our neighborhood and guidebook content is some of the best in the world because it’s written by locals who live there. To make guests’ experiences in your neighborhood even better, update your guidebook and share your recommendations.
We want your feedback
Gathering input from the host community is a part of our process whenever we create new features. We spent countless hours gathering hosts’ insights, performing research, and analyzing data before making these changes.
Starting today, the new search experience will first be available to a small group of hosts and guests. Over the coming weeks we’ll gradually roll these updates out to more hosts and guests so we can use their feedback to make improvements. If you want to learn more, join us for a webinar and live Q&A on April 27 at either 10am PDT or 5pm PDT.
We make changes every day based on host and guest feedback, but this update is significant, so we want to make it easy for you to share your insights. Please share your feedback with us on any of the new updates to help us make additional improvements. We’ll be sure to share key themes from your insights and our plans to address them in the coming weeks.