The Airbnb Category Hack: How to Optimize & Get More Bookings (Ep 631)

In this episode of ‘Get Paid for Your Pad', Jasper Ribbers discusses the importance of Airbnb categories and how hosts can request to be listed in specific categories to enhance visibility and performance. He emphasizes the growing gap between professional and non-professional inventory in the short-term rental market and the necessity for hosts to optimize their listings. The episode provides a step-by-step guide on how to request category changes, the criteria for being accepted into certain categories, and tips for improving overall listing quality. Jasper also shares valuable resources for hosts to enhance their Airbnb business.

Takeaways

You can request specific categories for your Airbnb listings.
The performance gap between professional and non-professional listings is widening.
Optimizing your Airbnb listing is crucial for success.
Being in multiple categories increases your visibility.
Request category changes if your listing is miscategorized.
Understanding category criteria can improve your chances of acceptance.
Details in your listing can significantly impact guest experience.
Bad reviews can severely affect your listing's performance.
Utilizing resources can help improve your Airbnb business.
Regularly updating your listing is essential for maintaining competitiveness.

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Jasper Ribbers (00:01.516)
What's up everybody, welcome back to Get Paid for Your Pad, episode 631. And today I am going to talk about Airbnb categories, because there's something that very few hosts know, which is that you can actually request the categories that you wanna be in for your Airbnb listings. This is something that I've noticed that not a lot of hosts notice. And so today I'm gonna walk you through exactly how you can

request categories to be listed in certain Airbnb categories for your listings. It's actually a very simple process that I'll walk you through. But before I do that, I want to give a little bit of context on why I think this is important and why I'm dedicating an entire podcast episode to this topic. So I was at a conference last week in Miami.

And one thing that we have been noticing, but that's been confirmed by a lot of companies that gather data in the SDR industry, is that the gap between professional and non-professional inventory is increasing. Meaning that non-professionally managed inventory in the shorter rental industry and on Airbnb, the performance of those units are decreasing while the performance of the professional inventory is…

increasing in performance. So the gap is widening. The market is pretty much flat. I'm sure you've noticed that there hasn't been a lot of growth in performance. Inventory has increased a lot, but the demand hasn't really caught up with the increase in inventories in many markets. so it's harder and harder for us to stand out with our Airbnb listings. And the hosts who are not focused on really professionally managing their SDR business, and in particular the marketing side,

are falling behind. And so it's really important that we optimize our Airbnb listings and other OTA listings as well, of course. But I'm going to focus on Airbnb today. And so it's really important that we absolutely optimize our listings and we don't leave any stones unturned. We cross all the T's and we dot all the I's. Because if you don't, then you're going to fall behind. So categories is something that, you know,

Jasper Ribbers (02:21.902)
Not a lot of people talk about it because when Airbnb can introduce it, we didn't really have much control over it, right? Airbnb automatically chooses the categories based on some algorithm that they have. And so, you know, if you're not aware of the fact that you can request to be in certain categories, then there's not really much you can do about it. It's just something that, you know, Airbnb determines.

And so there's not a lot of conversation around this. But I'm going to change that because I actually do believe that it's important to be in the right categories for a couple reasons. Number one is if you do a search on Airbnb in your area, there's probably going to be hundreds, if not thousands of listings that pop up. But if you click on a certain category in your search, then you'll see that there's a lot less listings that will show up.

And so if you're in a lot of categories, then more people will find you. And also, if somebody searches outside of your area, but they search inside a certain category, your listing might actually show up, even though you're not located in the area that the person is searching in. And I will share my screen and demonstrate that here in a minute. But if you're listening to this, I recommend open up your laptop, take some time.

to sit down and open up your Airbnb account because I'm literally gonna share with you the exact process on how to request these Airbnb categories. So I highly recommend you do this for your listings. It doesn't cost anything. It'll take like an hour or two maybe depending on how many listings you have. And I believe this can bring a significant change or…

add some add significant revenue to your listings. So first off, I'm going to share my screen here and I'm going to walk you through how to do this. here we go. I'm going to share my screen. All right. So here you're looking at our Airbnb account for FreeBout. You'll see we have four cabins in Idlewild.

Jasper Ribbers (04:44.952)
And we also have a listing for the entire village that we rent out. So first thing you need to do is, so you need to go into your Airbnb account, click on the listings tab, and then just click on one of your Airbnb listings. Okay, so I'm gonna click on Black Mountain here, we'll scroll down a little bit and you'll see there's a section that's called property type. Okay, now if you scroll down, that's where you can see which categories your listing is currently featured in.

So for us, we are in tiny homes and we are in cabins for this particular property. Now, I'll open up a different screen here. So here, you see Airbnb. I'm going to type in Idlewild, which is where our cabins are located. And I'm going click on Search. So what you can see is there's 870 places in Idlewild that are listed on Airbnb.

That's a lot of listings for a pretty small area. Obviously, if there's so many places in Airbnb, it's hard to stand out, right? But if I now click on Tiny Homes, which is a category that our cabins are listed in, so I'm going to click on Tiny Homes, you will see that now there's only 29 listings left, right? So it's much easier.

to be found if you're one of 29 versus one of 670. So it's pretty obvious that if somebody were to search for tiny homes in Idlewild, it'll be easier for them to find our listing. So as I scroll down here, you can actually see this is one of our cabins here, Coulter Pine. Now, the other thing I was going to show is

So when you click on a category, sometimes the map will zoom out. So for example, let's say I click on Chef's Kitchen, right? So there's over 100 Chef kitchens within 30 miles. But see how that range has now increased? And sometimes the map will even zoom out. So if you play around with this a little bit, you'll see that. But if I go back to Idlewild, there's only 23 Chef kitchens, right? But when I first clicked on it, it was showing me

Jasper Ribbers (07:09.056)
over 100, so it's showing me places that are actually not in the search area. so if somebody, let's say like somebody is searching in like, let's say they search in Palm Springs, right, which is not far from Idylwild, right? So let me do a search in Palm Springs. And now I'm gonna click on Tiny Homes. Look what happens, like the map zooms out. And you can see there's actually a listing in Idylwild. This is not our listing, but.

there is a tiny home that now pops up in the search results. So now if somebody is looking for a tiny home in Palm Springs, they might see this listing in Idlewild and they might actually change their plans and say, hey, you know what? This looks so cool. Instead of going to Palm Springs, why don't we go to Idlewild? So it's just another way that your listing can be found. And so those are the two main reasons that it's important to be in.

as many categories as possible. All right, so let's go back to our listing here. So I'm going to show you how you can request these categories. So when you go down to property type, you'll see on the right, you'll see the categories that you're in. Now there's a little link there that says learn more. If you click on that link, you go to the help center, the Airbnb help center.

Here you can read a little bit more about how categories work, how Airbnb selects certain categories. Pretty basic, but the most important section here is the section where it says request a category change. If you believe your listing is not correctly categorized, you can request a category by change by the following steps below. So you got to sign in to Elevate.

Now, if you're already signed into your account and you click on this Elevate link, it should take you automatically to the website where you can request the categories, as you can see here on the screen. If you're listening to this podcast, you can go back and watch it on YouTube so you can kind of follow the steps. But this, yeah, this is the website where you can request these categories. Now, I'm going go back to the help section first for a second here because

Jasper Ribbers (09:29.046)
It's important to understand the process on Airbnb's side before you request a category. Okay, you can select up to five categories to add to your listing. If you wanna add more, you have to wait for these five categories to be reviewed first and then you can request additional categories. So if you think that you should be, you have more than five that you wanna request, just request up to five first and then later after they've been reviewed and then you've been, they're

been a decision, then you can request more. But here's another important point. After selecting your categories, your request will be sent for review by our team. So a human being is actually going to look at this. And that's really important to know because that person is going to decide whether to accept or reject your suggestion. So if you look at ours, for example, we look at Black Mountain here. We weren't in cabins.

in the cabins category, which is kind of strange because our houses are cabins, right? We're in the woods. We're basically cabins in the woods. But Airbnb's algorithm is not that great in selecting these categories. So a lot of the times, the categories that Airbnb puts you in just don't make any sense. Like for example, we were in the category lake. Well,

there's really no lake anywhere near our kevins. And so we actually requested to remove that, which is something that I also highly recommend. Like if Airbnb puts you in a category that's completely off, request to remove it. There's no point. We do want to be in as many categories as possible to maximize our exposure. But we do not want to be in a category that doesn't make any sense because what's going to happen if somebody searches for lake and our listing pops up, they are never going to book it.

right, because they want to be in a lake or nearby a lake, right? So it's basically, it doesn't really help. And it might even hurt because Airbnb also tracks like how many times they show you a listing and how many times people click on it and how many times people book it. And so it probably is going to have a bad effect on your conversion rate. But also, like, you know, it doesn't really help anybody to be in a category. It doesn't help the user. doesn't help you. It doesn't help Airbnb. It doesn't really help anybody, right? So

Jasper Ribbers (11:54.358)
So yeah, you'll probably notice that you're in some categories that don't really make sense. And so you can remove those. And so here you can see that we've requested cabins. We also requested design. They rejected that. We requested Chef's Kitchen, Creative Spaces. That was also rejected. And again, there's a human being who's going to look at this. And so a lot of these categories, they're kind of based up. They're up for interpretation. I mean, what's design?

I mean, if you look at our listings, let me show you some pictures of our cabins here in Aydabaut. I mean, we spent a lot of money on interior design. And arguably, our units are probably in the top 5 % or if not top 1 % of best designed units in Aydabaut. So I think we should absolutely be in the design category. But unfortunately, the person that reviewed it

you know, doesn't agree with us. Now that person, we don't know who that is. Like, you know, Airbnb reps, it's probably an Airbnb rep, somebody that not might not really be that knowledgeable on the topic of design. we don't know, but what we can do and why it's important to understand this is what we can do is we can, we can make it as clear as possible to, to the person that's going to review our listing that we should be in this category.

So how can we do that? Well, step one is we need to understand what are the criteria for being in a certain category. And you can find some clues to those criteria. Airbnb doesn't tell you on their website. At least I haven't seen it. So if you do know where I can find that, then I would love to please reach out to me, jesper at freewell.com.

because I haven't been able to figure that out. But what you can do is you can go back to your own listing and look at all the categories that you are already listed in because sometimes they'll tell you what the criteria is. Like for example, here tiny homes, the criteria is a standalone home that's usually less than 400 square feet. So it's not a super well-defined criteria because…

Jasper Ribbers (14:17.134)
It says usually, so that means like not always, right? So for example, ours is actually 450, but we're still in tiny homes. But at a minimum, you can get like a clue as to like how likely it is that you'll be approved. But also you'll get a clue as to some potential changes that you can make to your Airbnb listing before you request the category to make it very clear that you should be in the category. So for example, if our house was less than 400 square feet,

we could add a photo to our listing. And maybe in the photo caption, we could write, this home is less than 400 square feet. Or here in the section where you can actually put the property size, if that's empty, and let's say you have a cabin that's 350 square feet or a tiny home that's 350 square feet, make sure you put that number in there, because that will probably help you your request to be approved.

Now, I pulled up another listing here. This is one of our revenue management clients, actually. But I pulled this up because there's five categories here, six categories here, so we can learn a little bit more. So for example, top cities, a home and urban center of a globally iconic city. So I don't know. Let's say you want to be in that category. Maybe you can Google and see if there's any definition of what is a iconic city. And maybe you can add.

that to your description or add it to a photo caption or whatever it is. Golfing, a home located on or near a golf course. So they don't mention a distance or something, which they do in some other cases. But if you want to be in golfing, which is probably a good category to be in, because people who golf typically are not very price sensitive. And so hosting some golfers can be very beneficial. We actually have a student who added golfing.

to some of the listings. And within a week, they had a whole group of golfing, golf people that came to book their home at a very good price. So ski in and out is really important if you're in a ski market. So here, there's a pretty clearly defined criteria. A home within a 10-minute walk of a ski lift, gondola, or cross-country skiing area. So if you're in a ski area,

Jasper Ribbers (16:43.182)
and you have a listing that would qualify according to this criteria, then it'd be very smart to make that very clear in your listing. So for example, you can take a screenshot of Google Maps and just put the location of your home and then put the location of the ski lift or the gondola or the skiing area and show that it's like less than a 10 minute walk, right? Because again, the rep…

the Airbnb rep that's going to review this is going to look at your listing. If you have a big photo there of Google maps saying like seven minute walk to the ski lift, right? That person can't really reject your request then, right? Versus if you don't have that, they have, they're going to have to figure that out, right? So they have to go and go Google maps, figure out where your location is, there's extra work. And so that decreases the chance that they will approve it. All right. The, think the idea is, I mean, those reps are probably very busy.

And so if you make their life easier by clearly having evidence on your listing that you should be in that category, then you kind of make their life easier and you probably have a better chance of being accepted, right? Amazing pools, a home with stunning pools. So that's kind of up to the interpretation of the rap, but wouldn't hurt to write a big caption and say like, hey,

I have this is a stunning pool, or maybe if there's ever been a guest who who called your pool stunning in the reviews, maybe you want to copy, you know, grab that quote from the review and put it on put it on as a photo caption on the on the on the listing or one of your photos of the pool. Skiing a home within a 10 minute drive. So same thing, right? Go on Google Maps. If you're if you're within a 10 minute drive, make sure that's that's Amazing views.

again, little bit up to the interpretation of the rep. But you get the point, right? You want to, before you request, make sure that you have an understanding of how best to communicate to the viewer of the Airbnb listing or to the Airbnb rep that you should qualify for these categories, okay? Okay, so let me go back to the…

Jasper Ribbers (19:08.151)
the category here. So another way to get here is to just put a URL, put this URL here, elevate.translated.com slash categories. If you're logged into your Airbnb account and you put that URL in the same browser, it should automatically log you in to this category request page. Now, if you don't put that categories there, if you just go to elevate.translated.com, then they'll take you to some sort of

other site where you can request a photo shoot and that's it. There's nothing else there. And there's no way to navigate to the categories. So the only way to get to that website is either click on the link in the help article or you just type it in. You just type in categories and then it will automatically take you there.

So to kind of summarize what I recommend is first, know, think about, look at your listings, think about which categories are most powerful. Obviously some categories are more powerful than others, right? We don't really have any data necessarily on what the most powerful categories are. However, you know, I do think, let me pull up Airbnb again. And these categories will also,

they are dependent on what market you're in, right? So every market has different categories. So if we search for Los Angeles or something, you'll notice that the categories might change a little bit, right? So depending on your location, the categories will be different. And so the first step is really to think about what categories do you think will be most powerful for you, right? Again, I haven't been able to find any data

But I do recommend just go through these, just go through the categories and just kind of see how many listings show up. Like for example, in LA, if I click on amazing pools, there's only 36 within 20 miles. So if you have a listing in Airbnb and you have a pool, if you can get yourself in that category, you're gonna be one of 36 only in a pretty large metropolitan area, right? So you can imagine,

Jasper Ribbers (21:26.262)
Amazing pools is probably something that people do look for, because who doesn't want to have an amazing pool, right? And it's warm enough in LA most of the year that you can actually use it. Amazing views could be a nice one too, right? Who doesn't like a view? And again, there's only 18 in the whole city almost, so that's pretty interesting. Chef kitchen, that's an interesting one. I've noticed that in order to qualify for

chef kitchen and it's pretty random. Honestly, it's very random. I mean, I've seen some kitchens where I'm like, is that really, I mean, is this a chef's kitchen? I don't really think so. I mean, if I was a chef and I had to cook in this kitchen, I'd be pretty disappointed, I think. But so yeah, it's pretty random. But what I have noticed is that the majority of the chef kitchens that I've seen, they have…

what's called like a little kitchen island. All right, so this, where do we go to kitchen here? So you see like this one's pretty small, but I've noticed that a lot of kitchens that are in this category have that little island. So if you have a little kitchen island in your kitchen, then you should have a pretty good chance. But even if you don't, if just your kitchen is kind of spacious and it has everything you need to cook like a pretty good meal, then you'll probably qualify.

But again, it's a little random. mean, we have one of our cabins that's in the chef's kitchen category, but interestingly enough, it's actually a unit that doesn't necessarily have the best kitchen. So again, there's a lot of randomness there. So all we can do is just kind of make an educated guess of what categories we should be in and then do our best to communicate that through our listing so that the rep is going to be an easy decision for the rep, right?

So let's look at some other categories here. you know, countryside, I don't know. I don't know if anybody would use that. I can see people using that as chef kitchen, right? Because if you like cooking, then having a great kitchen might be important to you, right? Beachfront, that must be a pretty popular one. Vineyards, I can see people using that. So yeah, you know, there's a lot of different categories that you can request.

Jasper Ribbers (23:53.728)
So just make an educated decision on that. And also make sure that you communicate it well through the listing. Now, going back, let me go back to the listing here for a second. So it usually takes a few weeks for the Airbnb team to get back and make a decision. They say that they'll send you an email. I haven't really seen that, but.

I, you know, you'll be able to see the results on this page here, right? So you could see here that they completed for us, they completed removing countryside and lake. So that's just not relevant for us. And they, and they added, Kevin's that was a May 5th. so that's a while ago that we did that, but then we requested the nother two, like on November 22, 22nd. like once, once Airbnb has made a decision, you can, you can go ahead and request more credit grades. Like we, could request more categories right now, actually. You see, if you.

If we click on this, we could go ahead and request more. Now, we've already requested pretty much all the ones that are relevant to us. So this already makes sense for us to keep requesting them. Or maybe it does. Who knows? Maybe if we request design again, maybe a different rep is going to look at it. And maybe they'll approve it. I guess there's no harm in trying again. You'll see that some of the categories are automatically generated. so you can't, like new, for example, and the

There's one up here as well, accessibility. So that's auto-generated so you can request it.

Awesome, so.

Jasper Ribbers (25:31.414)
Stop sharing my screen here. So yeah, this is one thing that we've learned over the last year or so as we're managing over a thousand homes for our revenue management service now. so with so many markets and so many listings and so many hosts that we talk to, so many operators, we're just learning a lot when it comes to revenue management, when it comes to Airbnb listing optimization.

really highly recommend you spend some time on optimizing your listings because without exception, every time I look at the least performing units in that portfolio of over 1,000 homes that we now manage, almost without exception, the bottom 10 performers are almost always, there's something missing on the Airbnb listing. It's either like the Airbnb listing is not complete, there's sections that are missing, there's captions missing.

Obviously, if the photos aren't good, then that's almost like a sure way to be an underperformer. But even small things, like just adding all the detail to the amenities, for example, that's something that a lot of people overlook. So I can show you quickly. Actually, I'm going share my screen a little bit here again. And I'm going to share a checklist with you guys at the end of this episode.

where you can kind of see what the most commonly forgotten sections are. But let me share my screen a little bit. We've got a little bit more time here to summarize as well. So a couple of sections that people often overlook is when you go to your amenities, you'll see that when you click on edit here, you see that we can now add a lot of detail to the amenities. So for example, bed linens.

You can click on the little pencil here, and you can actually put the brand of your linens. So a lot of detail. you might think, well, how important is this? Well, I do think it is important. The details matter. A couple of years ago, it was different. 2021, whatever you put on Airbnb, probably go booked. Right now, different story. Very, very competitive. So I do think the details do matter, actually.

Jasper Ribbers (27:52.494)
Because you know what, somebody might be allergic to different materials. And they might be looking for cotton or a certain brand or something that they know that they don't have any problems with. So the details matter. So I would recommend go through this list and just add as much detail as possible. This is also a signal to Airbnb that you're on top of updating your listing. And we all know that that helps with the search results. A couple amenities are really important.

Number one is TV and wifi. You got to make sure you have your wifi speed up there. But for TV, that's really important because, you know, who watches TV these days? mean, nobody, right? Everybody wants to watch Netflix and Apple TV and whatever it is. So there's a whole list of options here. And that could matter too, right? Because, you know, let's say somebody, somebody's watching a series on, on who knew or whatever it is.

They might be looking for that because it's easier if you have that, it's easier for them to watch it. So it's really important to make sure that you add detail there. Things like air conditioning is also quite important because I remember one time when I was renting out my very first listing in Amsterdam, I put that I had an AC, but it was kind of like one of those portable AC units.

It's not like a central air conditioning. And then somebody kind of got mad at me because they were expecting central air conditioning or a split type ductless system. And I didn't have that, right? So really important to add this type of detail to your listing. It'll prevent bad customer experiences. And we could do whole podcast on that as well. Because these days,

The getting bad reviews is a big problem, especially now because Airbnb is focusing so much more on quality. We have the guest favorite now, but there's also a little batch that will show up in your listing if you're in the least 10 % performing units.

Jasper Ribbers (30:11.574)
Getting bad reviews is a big problem these days because also you can't easily create like a new listing because Airbnb can track like duplicate listings these days. They also, if you get a couple two or three star reviews, they'll actually, they might actually suspend your listing for a week or they might delete your listing entirely. We've seen that happen a couple of times within these, clients' portfolios. And so the more detailed you add to your listing, the less chance that somebody will book it and there's confusion around.

like the amenities that you have or whatever it is, right? So your listing should be as accurate as possible. So yeah, I recommend go for your Airbnb listing and make sure that you don't leave anything not filled out. So every section on your Airbnb listing should be filled out. And to help you with that, as I promised on the previous episode that I recorded,

we're, we're making a lot of resources available to our community. and so every podcast episode, I'll share, I'll share one resource that you can, that you can use to improve your, your business and generate more revenue. Okay. So today what I'm going to share is if you go to free wealth foundry.com and my share my screen again for those who are watching on YouTube.

If you go to freewildfoundry.com slash checklist, OK, so freewildfoundry.com slash checklist, you can download a guide that we put together. It's a PDF Airbnb listing optimization PDF. It has 14 pages. And it'll walk you through the most over-looped aspects of your Airbnb listings. It has a lot of detail here, as you can see. So pretty powerful resource. It's for free. You don't even need

I have to put your email or anything. can just download it right away. So go to freewildfoundry.com slash checklist. And freewild is spelled with a Y instead of an I. So F-R-E-E-W-Y-L-D. And then foundry.com slash checklist. And if you haven't yet, you should also.

Jasper Ribbers (32:29.742)
You also download our training, freeboltfoundry.com slash ACP. That stands for Airbnb Custom Promotion. This is the one that I mentioned last in the last episode. Okay, so if you go to that, can actually, you can put in your name, your email, and we'll actually send you a mini series. So we recorded a bunch of videos to show you exactly how to leverage Airbnb Custom Promotions. And that can have a significant effect on your revenue for sure. Okay, so.

two resources that you can get for free to increase your revenue. And with that said, is the end of this podcast episode. So thank you for listening. As I mentioned on the last episode, we will be publishing two new episodes every week. So our goal is to publish a podcast every Monday and every Friday. You can find the podcast on YouTube. You can listen on all the different

channels that are out there. We're on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, all these other platforms. And so we will be publishing a lot more episodes. We'll have guests as well, of course. I'm just doing a couple solo episodes now to kind of share some of the stuff that I've learned over the last year. But definitely keep an eye out on the podcast. Make sure you subscribe so you get all the episodes.

And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. My email is jasper at freewild.com. Feel free to reach out with any questions. I do actually read all of the emails that I receive, and I typically respond within a couple business days. So with that said, I hope you have a great weekend. We will be back on Monday with another episode of Get Paid for Your Pad. We'll see you then.