Our commitment to providing the highest quality stays

Since welcoming the first Airbnb guests in 2007, our community has grown to over 5 million hosts, welcoming over 2 billion guest arrivals¹ in almost every country across the globe.

Even as our community has grown, our platform remains one built on trust. We’re committed to helping every guest have a positive and memorable experience and providing hosts with the tools they need to provide the best possible stay. Quality matters at every step of the Airbnb experience, from finding and booking a home, and having a positive stay, through to leaving a rating and review at the end of a trip.

Every day, over a million guests check into an Airbnb² , and we want each of them to feel confident knowing what they can expect when they book. That’s why we are excited to release our first Global Quality Report—a comprehensive look at how we’re improving quality and reliability across our platform. This report reflects our ongoing commitment to perfecting our core service while providing greater transparency to our stakeholders around the world. 

Improving the guest experience 

From first-time bookers to long-time guests, we know what guests value: reliable, high-quality listings. 

Quality isn’t simply determined by a listing’s overall rating. There are many factors that contribute to the quality of a guest’s stay, including cleanliness, ease of check-in, accuracy, host cancellations, and Community Support issues. As we’ve worked to raise quality on Airbnb, we’ve taken steps to improve all of the different aspects that contribute to a positive stay.

Over the past three years alone, we’ve launched more than 535 new features and upgrades to help perfect the core service and make Airbnb an overall better service for both hosts and guests. Below is a snapshot of some of the initiatives we’ve launched and the positive impact they’re having on both guests and hosts. 

Helping guests find the best places to stay

To make it easier for guests to find the best places to stay, we’ve launched features like Guest Favorites – a collection of the most-loved homes on Airbnb, based on ratings, reviews, and reliability data – and top listing highlights, which show percentile ranking for the top 1 percent, 5 percent, and 10 percent of eligible homes. 

Guests are loving these updates. Since its launch, over 250 million nights have been booked at Guest Favorite listings³ with the average overall rating across all Guest Favorites remaining high at 4.92.⁴ Listings in the top 1, 5, and 10 percent of ranked listings globally, have also received over 3 million five-star ratings⁵, making up a fifth of all five-star reviews⁶. We also revamped ratings and reviews – including adding the ability to sort reviews from lowest to highest, added a rating distribution chart, and more details about the reviewer – to help guests more easily understand if a listing is right for them. 

We’ve also focused on reducing host cancellations, which we know is a major pain point for guests, and made significant changes to deter avoidable host cancellations, including:

• adjusting default booking settings and reducing calendar availability, to give new hosts greater control and flexibility before their first booking;
• new pricing tools for hosts to allow them to easily see the price guests pay, to help prevent inaccurate pricing; and
• firmer consequences and stricter policies for host cancellations that could have been avoided.

These updates have contributed to host cancellation rates decreasing nearly 30 percent year over year.⁷

How better stays impact ratings and reviews 

We believe our investment in listing quality, host education, and deterring host cancellations has contributed to a positive impact on guest ratings and reviews.
Ratings and reviews are one of Airbnb’s initial innovations. Over the past 16 years, guests have left over 460 million reviews⁸ – which has, in turn, helped other guests find and choose the right stay for them. Since making investments in improving quality and reliability, we’ve seen an average listing rating of over 4.75.⁹ Last year more than four out of every five reviews¹⁰ left by guests were five stars, and less than 1 percent of reviews were one-star.¹¹

Helping hosts provide high-quality stays 

As we retain and attract new hosts, we’re committed to keeping our supply quality high. To empower hosts to deliver world-class stays, we’ve provided them with extensive resources in our Resource Center such as our 5-Star Hosting series to help them understand how to provide excellent hospitality and earn the highest rating possible. Our Superhost program, which is in its 10th year, also continues to reward our top-performing hosts. Last year, our Superhost community grew by almost 15 percent¹² to over 1.3 million hosts¹³ – the highest in our history. 

Boosting trust with hosts 

We’ve also launched a number of initiatives to help hosts feel confident about welcoming guests into their home. This includes our ID verification process for guests and hosts as well as our proprietary reservation screening technology, aimed at helping to reduce unauthorized and disruptive parties. Since launching over a year ago, our reservation screening technology has blocked or redirected more than 1.4 million guests¹⁴ worldwide from attempting to book on Airbnb. 

Hosts can also better understand a guest’s history on Airbnb before accepting a booking by reading reviews from past hosts, using our secure messaging service to ask the guest questions before their stay, or if they’re a new host, specify that they would like an experienced guest for their first reservation. 

Removing low-quality listings 

While features like Guest Favorites and top listing highlights help guests find the best places to stay, guests may still encounter listings that fall short of their expectations. 

In 2023, we launched our updated hosting quality system, which takes a more targeted and holistic approach to evaluate listings against our quality criteria. It has been an effective way to evaluate listings on Airbnb, provide education and actionable feedback for hosts, and remove listings that fail to meet our bar for quality.

Since its launch, we’ve removed over 400,000 listings that failed to meet our quality standards.¹⁵ By removing these low-quality listings, we’re helping to reduce the likelihood that guests might have a negative experience, as evidenced by an approximately 15 percent decrease in the percentage of quality-related customer service issues year over year.¹⁶ 

Our work continues

At Airbnb, we are constantly innovating for our community. We’re proud of the progress our dedicated teams, industry-leading policies and products, and valuable partners have made to help make each stay a positive experience for guests and hosts – but we know our work continues. 

We look forward to sharing more about the positive impact of our continued efforts.