Since its inception in 2007, Airbnb has grown to encompass over 5 million hosts and facilitated more than 2 billion guest arrivals globally. The company emphasizes the importance of trust within its platform, aiming to ensure a positive experience for both guests and hosts.
Airbnb has introduced its first Global Quality Report, which highlights efforts to enhance quality and reliability across the platform. This initiative is part of their ongoing commitment to improving core services while providing transparency to stakeholders worldwide.
The report outlines various factors contributing to a high-quality guest experience, such as cleanliness, ease of check-in, accuracy, host cancellations, and community support issues. Over the past three years, Airbnb has launched more than 535 new features and upgrades aimed at refining these aspects.
Among the new features are Guest Favorites—a collection of highly-rated homes based on ratings, reviews, and reliability data—and top listing highlights that showcase percentile rankings for top-performing homes. Since the introduction of Guest Favorites, over 250 million nights have been booked with an average rating of 4.92. Listings in the top percentiles have received over 3 million five-star ratings.
Airbnb has also revamped its ratings and reviews system by adding features like sorting reviews from lowest to highest and including a rating distribution chart. These changes aim to help guests make informed decisions about their bookings.
Efforts have been made to reduce host cancellations significantly. Host cancellation rates have decreased nearly 30% year over year due to measures designed to deter avoidable cancellations.
The company continues investing in listing quality and host education. The Superhost program remains active in rewarding top-performing hosts; last year saw a nearly 15% increase in Superhosts, totaling over 1.3 million hosts—the highest number recorded.
To ensure security and prevent unauthorized activities, Airbnb employs ID verification processes for both guests and hosts alongside reservation screening technology. This technology has blocked or redirected more than 1.4 million booking attempts worldwide since its launch.
In response to listings not meeting expectations, Airbnb updated its hosting quality system in 2023 with a targeted approach that evaluates listings against set criteria. Consequently, over 400,000 low-quality listings were removed from the platform.
Airbnb continues innovating for its community with industry-leading policies and products aimed at enhancing each stay's quality for guests and hosts alike.