Airbnb's analytic Insights offer some great information. But if you want to take your vacation rental to the next level, you'll need more than just Airbnb metrics.

Why Airbnb’s Analytic Insights Aren’t Enough for Successful Hosts

Succeeding on your Airbnb journey can be daunting. From making the leap buying (or renting) a property, to getting it up and running, to making sure it achieves your revenue or occupancy goals long term—there’s a lot to consider. That last challenge can be the trickiest for many hosts. 

Airbnb offers some analytics for hosts who opt into their “professional hosting tools.” These provide helpful insights about how your property is performing over time and against listings that Airbnb considers “similar.” But the insights are sparse and leave out some critical information hosts need to understand larger trends in their market, beat their exact competition, and ultimately be successful.

At the end of the day, Airbnb Insights are absolutely helpful, and successful hosts should take advantage of this hyper-specific data to track the performance of their listings. But to take your Airbnb business to the next level (and beat that listing a few houses over), you can’t rely on this information alone; it’s simply not enough.

Once you opt into Airbnb’s professional hosting tools, you get access to an “Insights” tab on your host dashboard. This shows you information like your earnings, Superhost status, opportunities that may earn you more bookings, and metrics about how your listings perform in three main categories:

When you’re in one of those categories, you can select which of your listings you want to see metrics for, set a date range you want to analyze, or see how your listings perform against similar listings on Airbnb (which you can refine with a few filters like number of beds, bedrooms, or bathrooms and listings with certain popular amenities).

Once you start digging into the numbers, Airbnb shows you how each metric changed either over time or compared to the competition (depending on which chart you choose). This is helpful as it shows you when changes occurred and gives you the exact percentage, day, or monetary information (e.g., “Nice work! Your overall quality rating is 3.7% higher than similar listings in the area.”).

Here’s a quick rundown of what you’ll find in the Airbnb Insights tab:

Quality: The Quality tab lets you drill into how your five-star reviews are trending overall and within each of the categories guests review you for (accuracy, check-in, cleanliness, communication, location, and value). If you’ve ever wondered why your rating is changing, this is a good place to start. If something like value, cleanliness, or communication ratings are trending down, those are relatively easy fixes. 

Occupancy & Rates: There is a lot of great information in the Occupancy & Rates Insights, like your occupancy rate, total number of nights booked and blocked, number of check-ins, average length of stay, and average nightly rate, just to name a few. This information is critical to understanding how your listing is really performing, especially during different time frames or against similar listings.

Conversion: Converting “lookers” into “bookers” is the name of the game with Airbnb, so these metrics are invaluable. This tab shows you your overall booking conversion rate, how many times you show up on the first page of search results, and how often people click on or book your listing. It also lets you dive into things like how often you’re added to a searcher’s wishlist, your listing’s average booking lead time, and what percentage of guests are repeat visitors.

Airbnb Insights are most helpful when it comes to understanding the performance of your specific property and really digging into your specific bookings, ratings, and how well your listing performs on Airbnb specifically.

Even with this great information, Airbnb Insights has some shortcomings. One of the biggest concerns right now is that you can only see a year’s worth of historical data. We all know that 2020 and 2021 were far from normal, so no matter how your listing performed over the last year, that’s likely not a great indicator of how it will perform going forward. Being able to see performance trends from several years ago (i.e., pre-pandemic) gives hosts a much more accurate understanding of what they can expect in the coming months.

Airbnb also isn’t very transparent about how they decide who is a similar listing. Other than being able to select the number of beds, bedrooms, bathrooms, amenities, and region, there’s no additional explanation. Airbnb doesn’t show you who they’re comparing your listing to, so you can’t be 100% sure that they sync up with who you consider your real competition.

This leads to another shortcoming with Airbnb Insights. Your listing doesn’t live in a bubble. Things like demand, booking trends, and rates shift on a much larger market level than Airbnb Insights shows you. While you can see into the future on some Airbnb Insights like Booking Lead Time, seeing your lead time versus a previous timeframe or against undefined “similar listings” doesn’t give you a critical understanding of how lead times might be changing in your market as a whole. For some metrics, getting a broad market-level view is much more helpful. If your booking lead time is down, but the market hasn’t trended down, then you might want to adjust your listing to make it more attractive. If booking lead times for the entire market are down, then there’s not an issue with your listing; it’s a larger trend. 

The same goes for other critical analytics like Occupancy Rate. Is your listing slow to book, or is everyone experiencing a slowdown? And how is occupancy impacted by other factors, like pricing? It’s all connected, but Airbnb makes it hard to see how all these trends interact.

AirDNA Future Demand Analysis showing occupancy rates, availability, and median listing prices.

Finally, one of the biggest shortcomings is something you might not think of right away. These are metrics based on Airbnb performance only. Many hosts list their properties on more than one platform or skip Airbnb in favor of other platforms. Obviously, Airbnb only shows you data from their platform, which isn’t always the whole picture when you’re trying to see how well you perform against the competition—especially if hosts in your area favor another platform, like Vrbo.

This article isn’t to say that you shouldn’t use Airbnb Insights. It’s a useful tool that lets you see critical information about your listing. It’s just that Airbnb Insights fundamentally doesn’t give you much market-level information, making it harder to understand your market (and competition) in a way that you can actually act on.

Instead, successful hosts take Airbnb’s information and layer it on top of more detailed data provided by short-term rental analytics solutions like AirDNA's MarketMinder™. These solutions go beyond just Airbnb listings, giving you a more accurate view of the market as a whole, so you know how you’re really performing (remember, not everyone lists on Airbnb). 

In addition to broader market insights, you can look more specifically at your direct competitors. Going beyond vague “similar listings,” AirDNA, specifically, lets you craft a Custom Comps list based on more robust filters than Airbnb—including the ability to exclude listings with amenities that you don’t have. (If you don’t have a pool, you likely don’t consider a nearby listing with a pool direct competition. So why should their occupancy and average daily rate be included in your comparisons and skew your numbers?) 

AirDNA Custom Comp Set Listing Attribute Filters

Once your Listing Attribute filters are set, AirDNA shows you the exact listings in your Custom Comps and allows you to deselect listings you don’t want to be compared to for personal reasons. (For instance, I don’t consider homes that are directly beachfront or across a major road as my direct competition because of how my rental market historically works. I deselect those properties in my Custom Comps view so I get the most accurate insights possible.) 

With your Custom Comps list refined to your liking, you get hyper-specific insights that you can trust and use to make smart decisions (like if you’re priced right to get bookings).

Used together, Airbnb and an outside data solution like AirDNA give hosts the deep insights they need to get the most out of their short-term rental.

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Why Airbnb’s Analytic Insights Aren’t Enough for Successful Hosts

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