Nobody spends more time on the Airbnb site or app than the service's hosts, who often spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking listings and responding to potential guests. In other words: They have strong opinions about tiny frustrations and fixes that could make the home-rental site easier to use. And as a long-time Airbnb host, I do too.
I spoke to several other veteran hosts and posed the same question to all of them: If you could change one thing about the Airbnb site or app, what would it be? Here are their answers.
"Right now, the Host Calendar view in the app doesn't show you the pricing for individual nights unless you tap into that specific date. To check on and tweak your pricing on mobile, it requires an enormous amount of work and steps to go into each individual date, basically forcing you to do this task on a computer while increasing the risk that dates will be mis-priced. I really wish the app would show us the pricing for each date directly in the calendar view" - Anonymous
"Keyword search! They used to have this feature. The day it was removed, our views dropped sharply. I wish they would bring it back!" - Ed from Miami
"I agree about keyword search. We've been saying for years that they should have that and I still think it's badly needed. It could help a lot of hosts. The search categories and filters are not sufficient and it's not a matter of adding more categories. There will always be words/terms that they leave out of a list of filters. Airbnb has an obsession with organizing things into known boxes and this can end up being both annoying and problematic to hosts, because there are always things that don't fit in boxes.
Also, stop hiding guest photos before booking. Airbnb recently began doing this. The amount of information about guests that hosts have available to use for screening is already very minimal. Taking away the photo makes it still harder to know if this is a person you feel comfortable or safe with in your home. Give us adequate access to information and the guest photo can assist by allowing an intuitive "hit" about the guest, that goes further to assist the host than many other things. Hiding guest photos demonstrates that Airbnb does not trust hosts to not discriminate." - Anonymous from Berkeley, CA
"I was unaware that if you have the setting to only accept guests with verified ID profile, other people are still able to send you requests and also book. This leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of situations." - Anonymous from London
"I’d love to be able to charge differently for adults and children to make it more affordable for families. There is already a drop-down menu for selecting adults versus children or infants, so it should be simple to add differential costing. For example, I’d charge $15 extra per night for an adult but only $10 for a child and $5 for a baby." - Fleur from Brisbane, Australia
"Listings that have no reviews within a year of listing should be removed from the site. These dormant listings just crowd cities unnecessarily. Some of these dormant review free listings have figured out a "work-around" to take the business off the platform, hence no reviews. There are many dormant listings that have been in my city for 3 years and longer.
Also, if a guest puts in a booking request without proper verification or without entering valid payment info, Airbnb blocks off those dates on my calendar for 24 hours while they square things away. Often, they don't; and I may miss bookings while these dates are blocked." - Donna from Manchester, NH
"Require both hosts and guests to complete the same steps to complete their profile: Upload a photo of themselves, verify phone, email, identity, and link to social media. That way, anyone with an incomplete profile cannot list a property (hosts) or inquire about a listing (guests). This would save hosts a lot of time explaining to prospective guests what is required to book, and this would give guests some assurance that the person they are staying with is legitimate." - Julie from Pittsburgh, PA.
"My husband is disabled. We are forever having to double-check with hosts what 'wheelchair accessible' means to them. It’s a lot more than a place with level surfaces (though sometimes we don’t even get those). It means things like no rugs (we frequently have to take those up), a walk-in shower (not a bath), and useful grab handles around the toilet and shower area. Generally, I don’t think Airbnb caters nearly well-enough for the elderly. Even a single step into a ground-floor apartment can cause a problem." - Joyce from Edinburgh, Scotland
