Airbnb Winter 2023 Updates

What’s up guys, in today’s video, I’m going to be walking through and sharing my thoughts on Airbnbs winter 2023 release. If you haven’t seen on November 8, Airbnb announced this big update the winter release for 23. That’s an update to their platform they’ve been working on for about a year now. And I just want to share some my thoughts on some really cool added new features, some changes the way those are going to impact you as an Airbnb host or investor or property manager. And I also want to share my thoughts on some of the kind of smaller features that are actually way more impactful than some of the other ones that just got kind of glazed over and left behind the you might not even be aware of even if you’ve already looked into the 2023 release. So stay tuned for that we’re going to touch on all of this stuff. So for starters, let’s talk about one of the biggest changes they’ve made. It’s going to really impact things for how guests look for properties. And it’s going to really impact you as an Airbnb host investor property manager and not guest favourites. So basically Airbnb revamped the way that reviews are shown to guests. And so they’ve got this new category, this new designation that you can achieve called guest favourites. So it’s almost like a step beyond super host status. And it applies to a property specifically rather than to a host. So that’s a really cool thing, because it basically gives you this call out when guests are searching for places that you can specifically see when a property is a guest favourite. Now that to me is really cool. Because you can see it’s just very, very obvious which ones are guest favourites because they’ve got this very clear call out right on the on the listing when you’re searching for properties. And you can see that they’re definitely favouring those guests favourite properties in search, just on the homepage, here, you can see that the majority of them are guest favourites. And we search for a stay, let’s just say we’re going to win as areas. And we’re going to check in for, you know, a week, and we’re going to go with two guests, you’re going to see that there’s already going to be a bunch of guest favourites that are highlighted up here at the top of the search results. So that’s going to be just a natural factor of just the way that Airbnb sorts their properties. Obviously, the properties that get higher views that guests love to book, those do get featured higher up. But you can see that there’s even more favouritism towards these guest favourites in any given search. And that they also get this column. Now another additional thing that didn’t used to be there was the super host call out, it’s just again listed right on that cover photo, you can see it as demonstrated there. And then when you get into the actual specific property, you get this huge call out right at the at the you know, above the fold on the page on the actual listing page. And then again, when you scroll down to look at the reviews, you get an even bigger just this massive call out that your property is a guest favourite. Now I think that’s gonna be really helpful to just have guests be be able to understand that, hey, this is a really good property, they can feel really good about it, it’s definitely going to help improve your conversion rate if you achieve this designation, so it’s worth getting now, another another really cool thing about the way that they’ve changed reviews is when you come in here, you can actually see specifically what people got rated on where they have lower ratings where they have higher ratings. So for this property, you can see that it got rated overall five right across the board for everything except for value. Now to me as a guest, that’s really important because if a property is rated lower on cleanliness, that might be a bit of a red flag to me. Whereas if a property is rated lower based on value, that’s super subjective, right. And so I’m not really concerned about it being rated slightly lower on value, whereas if it were rated slightly slower on cleanliness or on accuracy, that might be cause for concern. You can also sort reviews now by most recent or by highest rated that’s pretty cool. Overall, I think the review process now just makes it a little bit easier for guests to choose the right property they’re going to have a great stay in which is in perfect aligned with Airbnb goals. They want to make sure that people are booking places that they want to keep on visiting time and time again, to build that loyalty to booking Airbnb is. And so I think all of this just really, really helps that cause. Now another thing they’ve done that’s quite cool is the the listings tab. And I think that does start to solve a problem that’s been there for a while on Airbnb, which is that there’s just so many things to update. There’s so many different amenities that you can highlight and add and and check off on Airbnb that when you’re going through to set up a new listing, it’s probably going to take you several hours and if you want to add an amendment to your property, it’s really hard to figure out exactly where to go to do that. It’s hard to scroll too because the nature of it is a property you can just have, you know 100 200 300 different amenities. And so you have to have this really long scrolling list of all the amenities that you have to wade through just to get to the one amenity you want to add. So they’ve made that a little bit easier where you can now just search for it.

It’s kind of cool categorised better that does help. It’s still not perfect, I wouldn’t say. But it does definitely make things a lot easier. And it’s going to make it so that you as a as a host or property manager, you’re able to just update your listing more easily, which is going to encourage more people to do it, which is going to make it easier to search for properties on Airbnb make everything better. Now, regardless of how difficult it is, I really want to stress that really going through and doing a detailed job of filling out your listing is super, super important. You’re definitely gonna get more bookings with a properly filled out listing that doesn’t doesn’t omit any important details, guest favourites we already talked about there. Another thing that I think is pretty cool is now they’ve got this, this AI powered photo tour. Now that’s cool, but I think it misses the point. This is actually I think one of the biggest kind of issues or gripes they still have with the with the new winter update is that Airbnb properly identify that people just weren’t using their photo tour feature, but I think they misdiagnosed The reason as to why. So when you go on Airbnb, typically what’s going to happen is you’ve come into the photos, and you can see the photos are laid out like this. Now that is obviously doesn’t give you necessarily a really good view of the property and the layout where everything is, if someone didn’t do a good job organising these photos, you can see here that we’ve got some outdoor shots, then we’ve got this living space, but maybe it’s not super clear to you because now we jump back to an outdoor shot, it’s just not super clear to where everything is and how the property is laid out. So having your photos structured in a way or organised in a way where it kind of guides the person through the property in a sort of virtual tour type manner, that is really beneficial. And so that’s what Airbnb is new release tried to do, they give this AI powered photo tour where you can basically click a button and it’s going to store your photos into the different rooms. So it’ll show up differently. The problem with that is that they really missed the mark on it. The reason people weren’t using that photo tour to begin with wasn’t because it was difficult to sort your properties into different rooms, it’s very easy to do, you’ve always been able to or for a long time, you’ve been able to go and designate this photo is a photo of the living room, this photo is a photo of the dining room, etc. And then your photos would show up differently. Let’s see if we can find an example here. Case in point, it took me about five minutes of searching there just to find a property that actually use this horrible photo tour feature. And you can see how it shows up now. So you can see that basically, it just sorts it into it sorts your photos into the different rooms. And then any photos that you haven’t sorted, you’ll see kind of just get grouped together into additional photos here at the end. Now, it really wasn’t ever that complicated. Brian Chesky. In the announcement video for the winter release, they said, Well, hey, no one was using this feature, no one was actually doing this. And it was because it was so difficult to go and click that this photo is a photo of the living room. So now we made it easy, we made AI able to do it. The problem is, that’s not why people weren’t using this feature, it was never hard to go and find a picture of your living room and check the box to say that’s your living room. What sucks about this is that you can’t actually choose the order of your photos. So for a property like this, I now have to start in the living room going through it. And then I’m gonna go to the kitchen, and then I’m gonna go to the dining room, and then I’m gonna go to the bedroom, I’m gonna keep on going. But then what if I wanted to highlight this right off the bat, I don’t get the option to do that, I can’t specify that I want to show some of my best amenities of the property first and foremost, and organise my photos that way. And then you also have these additional photos that just kind of get lumped in at the end here. So now you’ve got like, yeah, like a whole bunch of other photos, your living room that should have been put up with your living room, but now they’re not there. And so it’s just really hard. And then if you have, for example, another bed that you want to showcase, it’s just really hard to do that with this kind of a photo layout. What you really want is to be able to choose exactly how you look at your photos and lay them out in the best possible way. So I think that if Airbnb is going to make an improvement on the way your photos get organised, it’s going to be either by combining this AI tool, with giving users the ability to determine exactly how that layout how that virtual tour gets structured, or by automatically organising the photos, not into rooms, but into an actual virtual tour where it walks them through the property. I don’t know how easy or difficult that would be. But I will say this winter release update of this AI powered photo tour I’m not excited to I’m not going to use it because I would rather have my photos show up in the order I choose where I can highlight some of those best hitting amenities up front so guests don’t miss those as opposed to just having them organised into rooms where sure it makes a little bit more sense, but it doesn’t actually work that well. And then maybe some of my best amenities like the outdoor space or the view are gonna get shoved all the way down to the bottom to where they decide to put the exterior photos. So yeah, not really the greatest I think that one just one

RJ missed the mark. Guys just want to take a quick break here to say that for those of you watching who want to build cashflow, and long term wealth by purchasing Airbnb and short term rental properties, there’s a link in the description right down below for a free training that will walk you through my exact strategy for investing successfully in Airbnb s. Now, if you’re not ready to actually buy properties, and you want to get started managing other people’s properties on Airbnb the same way I got started and build a full time income managing other people’s properties, there’s actually another free training linked in the description down below as well, that’ll be a really great fit for you. So whether you want to invest in short term rental properties, and actually build amazing cash flow and long term wealth by acquiring the assets, buying the properties themselves, or you’re looking to earn a full time income, managing other people’s properties on Airbnb, we’ve got some awesome trainings that are linked in the description down below, that will definitely help you out. When you sign up for the trainings, we’re also going to send you a few other tools and resources completely for free just to help you get started. Again, the links to sign up are in the description down below. And both trainings and all the tools are completely free. So make sure to register for the trainings, links in the description down below

Now SmartLock integration, it’s crazy that it’s taken them this long to come out with it. Because using third party tools, you could do this for a long time. It’s long overdue, but great to see if SmartLock integration is here. Now one of the things that I said before was that there’s some some tools that I think are just kind of got slept on just kind of got grazed over in the announcement that are honestly game changing. And one of the most long overdue features is the new options for co host payouts. It’s literally a decade overdue. Yet finally, now you can specify if you’re managing someone’s property that you want the cleaning fee to go to you. And then on top of the cleaning fee, you want a percentage of the revenue. That is always how property managers have been paying themselves. You what it used to be is that you could specify different payment routing rules on Airbnb to say, let’s put 80% of the revenue into this bank account for the property owner and 20% of this revenue into my bank account as the property manager. But the problem with that is that it then would split all the revenue, including the cleaning fee, so the property owner would get 80% of cleaning fee and you the property manager would get 20% of the cleaning fee. But your as the property manager probably paying the cleaner with 100% of the cleaning fee to go by there. So it makes it a huge mess. And it meant that the payout routing and Airbnb was pretty much useless. Now instead of doing that, you can send your cleaning fees to one person, your cleaner, you can send a percentage of just the revenue to you as a property manager, you can send the cleaning fee and a percentage of the booking revenue over to you as the property manager. And then the other percentage of just the booking revenue over to the property owner, you can organise it in different ways. That means that finally, after a decade of waiting for this to happen, you can actually use the payout routing features on Airbnb, go figure that it would have taken them this long to figure out such a basic and simple thing. But finally they actually did it. So for any of you guys out there who are managing other people’s properties on Airbnb, your life just got a fair bit easier. Now you can just payment routing, you can just do that before it used to be that now you would have to take in all the fees. And then you’d have to send out payments to the proper ers, no more do you actually have to do that, which simplifies things means you don’t have to hold on to their money just makes it very, very easy. So that I think is fantastic. I really, really am happy to see that finally happen. It’s about time comparing prices. That’s another feature that they’ve had that they’ve put out there where you can basically compare your prices against other people’s prices in the market that have similar properties, I think I have a pretty good understanding of why they’re doing that. I think what Airbnb is going for is they want people to be more realistic with their prices, they want to bring prices down overall. So it’s cool. It’s a cool feature to have, I think it’s going to be it’s going to probably achieved their goal of having fuel lower prices. But I also don’t think that it’s actually something you should rely on for your pricing strategy, if you’re trying to optimise your booking performance, your booking revenue. I think ultimately the reason they did this is because a lot of hosts just list their prices sky high and have no clue what they’re doing. And by giving them this functionality to actually compare properly to accurate comps, and will hopefully have them lower their prices. But I also think it’s going to have you lowering your prices too much. It’s going to create bidding wars it’s going to create kind of a competition like a race to the bottom, which I don’t like so much. And so we’ll see how that actually ends up playing out the earning dashboard. I haven’t really gotten a chance to play around with and see the updates that I didn’t honestly think there was much of a problem with that to begin with. So it’ll be interesting to see what they did. But yeah, these are the main

and kind of points of the of the release the price visibility, again, I don’t think is a really huge thing. I think that ultimately, again, they’re just trying to get people to have a better understanding of what the pricing actually looks like to a guest, which, again, it really shouldn’t factor in that much to your overall pricing strategy, you should have a more data driven pricing strategy, and not really be factoring this stuff in to too much. But I mean, ultimately add on see it being a positive or negative if they made that, that adjustment. So those are my thoughts on the new winter at least for 2023. But I’d love to know yours. Let me know your thoughts or questions or comments in the comment section down below. If you liked this video and got value from it, make sure you hit the thumbs up button and give this video like it does help me with getting these videos in front of more people and growing this channel. And last but not least, if you haven’t yet subscribed to the channel, then make sure you hit that subscribe button because we post two new videos every single week here on the channel help you to succeed on Airbnb and short term rental platforms. So make sure you hit the subscribe button so you can stay up to date with those videos. And with all that said, thanks so much for watching this video and I’ll see you in the next one.