Travel is continuously changing, together with the way we search for lodging and experiences. Airbnb has always looked to improve their search algorithms in order to enable guests to discover the best homes for their trips for 25 years.
As changes in the more recent years have happened a lor faster than before, together with people traveling a lot more after 2 years of staying at home, Airbnb announced its biggest release with innovative features that benefit guests, as well as hosts.
Read on for more details about Airbnb’s 2022 summer release and how that affects property managers and Airbnb hosts.
As this is the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade, where are its main three features:
- Airbnb categories – an innovative way to search making it easier to search and discover the most suitable homes you could not find earlier;
- Split Stays – a new feature offering more options for long-time stays, like splitting your trip between two homes;
- AirCover for guests – the most effective and comprehensive travel protection, free for every stay.
“The way people travel has changed forever. That’s why we’re introducing the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade,” said Brian Chesky, CEO and Co-Founder of Airbnb. “First, people are more flexible about where they live and work, so we’ve designed a new way to search with Airbnb Categories. Second, people are taking longer trips, so we created Split Stays to give you more options by splitting your trip between two homes. And third, we’re introducing AirCover for guests, giving you the confidence to book knowing that Airbnb’s got your back.”
Categories
Homes in over 100,000 towns and cities were split in 56 categories based on their style, location, features and facilities (like pools, for example) or proximity to specific activities and attractions. This way, the intelligent map is able to zoom to show you results based on the relevant categories for the selected destination.
This feature organizes homes by what makes them unique, thus making it a lot easier for hosts to showcase their special services and facilities.
Also, Categories enable guests to discover new locations they wouldn’t have searched or before, thus being of great help for hosts outside the most popular tourist destinations.
Split stays
As almost half of the trips booked during the last three months were for a week or longer, Airbnb has created the Split Stays feature. This feature helps split your trip between two homes, so that you can see roughly 40% more listings than you could before.
Split Stays will automatically search for nearby homes and show you the distance between them, so that you can easily plan your trip ahead.
Also, hosts will benefit from a higher occupation than before. This is because, when they had for example, a 3-day trip booked and another weekend just 4 days later, a customer wishing to spend a whole week in the area at the same time could not book that specific home. Now, they can book 4 days in the first home, and 3 days in a nearby one. Airbnb will automatically pair two homes with similar amenities, so that the guests get what they are looking for.
AirCover for guests and hosts
AirCover is an extended protection for guests, in case they encounter any issues with their home. This way, they can get an immediate home change for a similar or better home, a refund or priority access to specially-trained safety agents.
This protection is especially designed to cover situations like: a host needing to cancel the booking within 30 days prior to check-in, check-in issues, home not being as advertised, etc.
AirCover for Hosts provides $1 million in Host damage protection and $1 million in Host liability insurance.
Hosts’ concerns
Hosts may be concerned that their homes are not being discovered as easily as before due to the changes in the 2022 Airbnb release. The platform assures them that they are constantly working with the host community and Host advisors to improve search refinement, and will shortly provide more updates. We are expecting to receive new updated in July.
Among the most frequent concerns, hosts ask about how can they know under which category their home might fall. The answer is: for the moment, there is no way to set a specific category or select a secondary one. Categories are established based on the home’s unique features or placement, as well as information provided by pictures (like style, for example). Airbnb is exploring ways to let hosts check what category their listing may be in. They will provide details in the months ahead.
Titles are something that hosts could use to make their listing stand out. For the moment, custom titles had been removed in order to create uniform descriptions across Airbnb that make it easier for guests to view and compare stays. Some hosts would use emojis and special characters that would confuse guests and lead to a poos experience. As of 17th June, Airbnb has published new guidelines for creating listing titles. They suggest limiting titles to 32 characters, writing your titles in sentence case, and avoiding emojis or symbols. Most importantly, describe what makes your place one of a kind.
Even though things are still changing after the 2022 summer release, Airbnb is constantly working with the developers team and Hosts community in order to improve all its new features. Don’t be afraid to leave any feedback or ask questions about your experience as a host, as this will benefit not only you, but also all your other fellow hosts and finally, your guests.