Airbnb Introduces Guest Favorites Badge for Two Million Homes (November 2023)

From the record. This is a look back at November 2023. The desk wrote it on 11 October 2026 from sources published at the time; Stay Gazette opened in July 2026 and did not report this as it happened.

On 8 November 2023, Airbnb introduced Guest Favorites, a badge and search filter for what it called the 2 million most-loved homes on its platform. The label arrived in the company's 2023 Winter Release together with a rebuilt ratings and reviews page and a Listings tab of new tools for hosts.

Airbnb said it had more than 7 million homes around the world. The Associated Press put the split plainly: the label would go to roughly 2 million listings out of the site's 7 million. Airbnb said the features would begin rolling out that week.

Brian Chesky, Airbnb's co-founder and CEO, described check-in in the company's release as the moment a guest finds out whether the home matches what was booked. He went on: “Too often, it doesn’t. We’re changing that today.”

What Airbnb announced

These are the features as Airbnb's release described them. They were due to begin rolling out that week, except where a later date is given.

Guest Favorites. Airbnb said it had built the collection from ratings, reviews and reliability records covering more than half a billion trips. A new badge marked the homes in search results and on the listing page, and guests could filter for them.
Reviews. The redesigned ratings page let guests sort reviews by recency or by rating and showed a chart of how a home's reviews were spread from 1 to 5 stars. Each review said more about the trip: where the guest was from, how long the stay was, and whether the guest travelled with family, pets or in a group.
Listings tab. Hosts got a redesigned listing editor for amenities, sleeping arrangements and the arrival guide. An AI-powered photo tour sorted a host's photos into 19 rooms, and the host could edit the result.
Smart locks. A host could connect a compatible lock to the Airbnb account, and a unique code would be generated for every reservation. Airbnb said the integration would start in the US and Canada later in 2023 and would work with certain Schlage, August and Yale locks.
Earnings and Co-Hosts. A redesigned earnings dashboard, in-app messaging with Co-Hosts, and two new ways to share a payout with a Co-Host: the cleaning fee, or the cleaning fee plus a percentage of the booking amount.

Two pricing features were promised for later. Under pricing visibility, the prices Hosts set would include service fees. Compare prices would show the prices of similar listings in the host's calendar. Airbnb said both would be available the following year.

Why Airbnb did it

Airbnb's own account was blunt. Guests had told the company that the range of homes on offer made it hard to predict what a booking would deliver. Airbnb said that pushed many people toward hotels, and called it the number one obstacle to booking on its platform. Chesky told the AP that not knowing what a listing would be like was the main reason a traveller picked a hotel room instead.

The company had tried inspections before. Short Term Rentalz reported on 10 October 2023 that Airbnb Plus, launched in 2018 with home visits against a 100-point checklist, would end on 6 November 2023, and on 8 November that Airbnb had discontinued it that week. The trade paper cited AirDNA for only 26,000 active Plus listings by January 2020, against a goal of at least 75,000 in the launch year. Chesky told TechCrunch that Airbnb could not inspect every home and did not want to try. He said it would instead invest much more in its review and reputation system.

The release came a week after Airbnb reported fast growth in supply. In its third-quarter results on 1 November 2023, Airbnb reported revenue of $3.4 billion, up 18% year over year. It said active listings had grown 19% from the third quarter of 2022 and that it had added nearly 1 million listings globally over the previous nine months. Hosts, it said, had earned more than $19 billion in the quarter.

What the numbers said and left unsaid

Airbnb gave averages for the badged homes. Guest Favorites were rated above 4.9 stars on average, it said, and scored well on ease of check-in, cleanliness, listing accuracy, Host communication, location and value. On reliability, the release said they had “Host cancellations and quality-related customer service issues below 1% on average”. Nearly two-thirds of Guest Favorites came from Superhosts, Airbnb said.

Those figures described the first 2 million homes. They were not published entry rules. TechCrunch reported that Airbnb did not specify the exact criteria it used to pick them, and updated its report on 9 November 2023 to say the company had not publicly defined them.

The badge sat on top of a rating scale with little room in it. TechCrunch reported that a home with a 4.6-star rating was in the bottom 20% of all Airbnb listings, and cited AirDNA for a 2022 average review score of 4.75 in the United States. Airbnb said guests had left over 371 million reviews. Chesky told TechCrunch the company did not want to scrap the five-star system, because two in three people left a review, and would add context to ratings with labels such as guest favorites.

Hosts already had a badge of their own. TechCrunch described Superhost as a status earned by keeping a 4.8 overall rating, a cancellation rate under 1%, and at least 10 short-term stays or 100 nights in the past year, evaluated quarterly. Guest Favorites was tied to the individual home. TechCrunch questioned whether customers would ever understand the difference.

What it could mean for the listings left out

The AP raised the question the release did not answer. The agency wrote that it was not clear how hosts left without the badge would respond: they might lose bookings, or need to drop their prices to stay competitive. Chesky told the AP he expected the badged homes to be priced above the rest. The AP also reported that Airbnb was guaranteeing nothing about the listings that carried the badge.

TechCrunch quoted Bram Gallagher, an economist at AirDNA, as saying he did not think Airbnb wanted to make listings uniform. Fuller listing details, he said, would ease some of the doubt that might be stopping people from booking a short-term rental.

Price was the other thread. The AP reported that Airbnb had begun discouraging high cleaning fees earlier in 2023 and that, according to the company, about 260,000 listings had lowered the fee since then. Behind the scenes, the AP said, Airbnb was working on help for hosts to adjust prices to demand, down to a daily basis.

The Gazette Verdict, looking back

Guest Favorites was Airbnb's cheap answer to its reliability problem, and it put the risk on hosts. Airbnb would not inspect every home, by Chesky's own account, and the AP reported it would guarantee nothing about the badged ones. It sorted listings by the ratings, reviews and reliability records it already held. About 2 million of 7 million listings were to get the label, which left roughly 5 million without it, and the AP's reading was that those hosts could lose bookings or have to cut prices while Chesky expected favorites to charge more. The money at stake was large: Airbnb said Hosts earned more than $19 billion in the third quarter of 2023 alone. Airbnb got a quality label without paying for inspections. A host should have taken one lesson from it: on a scale where, by TechCrunch's report, 4.6 stars already sat in the bottom fifth, every review and every cancellation had become a pricing decision.

The other side

The case for the badge is that Airbnb said uncertainty about what a home would be like was the main thing keeping people from booking, and a guest who books a hotel instead is a booking lost to every host. A label drawn from ratings, reviews and reliability records across more than half a billion trips rewarded hosts who had done the work, and nearly two-thirds of the first batch came from Superhosts. The inspection programme Airbnb closed that week had only 26,000 active listings by January 2020, on the AirDNA count Short Term Rentalz cited. The same release offered every host new tools, and Airbnb said fuller listings could get up to 20% more bookings.

What it meant for hosts

In November 2023 a host had no published checklist to work from, only the averages Airbnb had released. The practical steps followed from those.

Guard the two measures Airbnb named. The first Guest Favorites averaged above 4.9 stars, with cancellations by Hosts and quality-related customer service problems below 1% on average. Airbnb said the collection drew on reliability as well as ratings and reviews, so cancellations and service complaints mattered alongside the stars.
Fill in the listing. Airbnb said many listings were missing details guests cared about and that fuller listings could get up to 20% more bookings. The Listings tab was where to add amenities and sleeping arrangements and to check the room labels the photo tour had assigned.
Plan for price to be more visible. Airbnb said that from the following year the prices a host set would include service fees, and that the calendar would show the prices of similar listings.
Check the lock. Hosts in the US and Canada with certain Schlage, August or Yale locks could expect a code for each reservation once the integration reached them.

Sources

Airbnb Newsroom, Airbnb 2023 Winter Release: Introducing Guest Favorites, a collection of the 2 million most-loved homes on Airbnb (8 November 2023).
Associated Press (via KSAT), There's too much guesswork in renting an Airbnb. The short-term rental giant is trying to fix that (8 November 2023).
TechCrunch, Airbnb leans on reviews to make listings more reliable as it tests review summaries using generative AI (8 November 2023).
Short Term Rentalz, Airbnb unveils Guest Favorites and Listings tab in Winter Release (8 November 2023).
Airbnb Newsroom, Airbnb Q3 2023 financial results (1 November 2023).
Short Term Rentalz, Airbnb to discontinue Plus programme in November (10 October 2023).
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Airbnb, Inc. Form 8-K, date of report November 1, 2023 (1 November 2023).

Airbnb Introduces Guest Favorites Badge for Two Million Homes