How to List on Airbnb in 2024 and Get Found by Guests

Listing on Airbnb in 2024 is more than just uploading text and photos. If you want to know how to list your place on Airbnb and keep it competitive, you’ll need to focus on quality, avoid duplicate listings on Airbnb, and highlight unique amenities guests are searching for.

In this article we’ll explore how to become an Airbnb host in a professional manner to ensure platform compliance, high rankings, and a steady stream of bookings.

2024 Changes that affect Airbnb listing creation

Airbnb removes 100.000 low quality listings

Recently Airbnb has been on a relentless campaign against low quality listings. This is the biggest purge in the company’s history.

What Airbnb considers a low quality listing:

• Overall rating of 4.0 or lower
• Poor customer response rate and communication
• Low listing info accuracy

New measures to reduce host cancellations

The updates to Airbnb's cancellation policies aim to reduce the likelihood of avoidable cancellations, like accidental double-bookings or hosts blocking pre-booked dates. This has already led to a 36% decrease in host cancellations in 2023. These measures are:

• adjusted default booking settings and reduced 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 prevent inaccurate pricing
• firmer consequences and stricter policies for host cancellations that could have been avoided

Airbnb listing verification

Verified listings and a guest favourite badge from Airbnb
In 2023, Airbnb started to verify the properties listed on their platform. By April, 1.5 million listings in select countries – including the US, the UK, and France, Canada, Australia – received a verification badge after authentication.

Hosts who get verified may now obtain a "Guest favourite" badge on their listing page. No specific action is needed to earn the badge; simply maintain an active listing.

Airbnb plans to improve verification with new tools like photo and video authentication and expand this program to 30 new countries by autumn 2024.

Guest favourite badge by Airbnb

Criteria for the Guest Favourite badge

Listings with the following positive metrics are eligible for the Airbnb Guest Favourite badge:

• Overall star ratings and feedback in guest reviews.
• Category ratings from guests for check-in, cleanliness, accuracy, host communication, location, and value.
• Host cancellation rates.
• Quality-related incidents reported to Airbnb customer service.
• A minimum of 5 reviews.

Airbnb will award a temporary Guest Favourite badge to the top 2 million listings aligning with the mentioned criteria every 24 hours. With 7.7 million active listings, 26% of them will get these badges.

A guest favourite badge is highly prioritised in search results as it supersedes even a Superhost status. So, if you qualify for both, the Guest favourite badge will be prioritised and shown instead of your Superhost badge.

Guest Favourite badge overrides Superhost status if you have both

New Ban on Indoor Camera Surveillance

As of April 30th 2024 Airbnb now has a ban on all indoor cameras for properties listed on their platform.

Previously some indoor surveillance had been allowed with the exception of toilets, restrooms and sleeping quarters. However this is what we will have now:

• Indoor surveillance is banned.
• Doorbell cameras & decibel monitors are allowed.
• Decibel monitors must be disclosed.
• Outdoor surveillance policies are updated: outdoor cameras not allowed in private areas like outdoor showers.

Avoiding Duplicate Listings on Airbnb

Having duplicate listings on Airbnb can hurt your search ranking and confuse potential guests. Airbnb’s system may even flag and remove duplicates, thinking they’re spam or accidental copies.

Common causes of duplicate listings:

• Connecting the same property to Airbnb through multiple channel managers

• Manually creating a second listing instead of editing the original

• Using similar titles and descriptions for different properties that look alike

How to avoid it:

• Audit your listings regularly to ensure each property appears only once

• Use Airbnb’s merge listing tool if you have two versions of the same property

• Keep all updates centralised — ideally through a single channel manager

By keeping your property unique in Airbnb’s system, you protect your visibility and ensure guests are booking the correct listing.

How to List Your Place on Airbnb and Get Found in Search

If you’re wondering how to list your place on Airbnb in 2024, it’s not just about filling out a form and adding photos. To get found in Airbnb search, you need to follow a few essential steps:

• Complete every detail of your listing profile — Airbnb’s algorithm rewards accuracy and completeness.

• Match your listing to the right category so you appear in the right filtered searches.

• Optimise for search filters by ticking off all applicable amenities, facilities, and house rules that apply to your property.

• Activate Instant Book — Airbnb confirms that faster booking availability improves your search ranking.

• Maintain high response rates and keep your calendar accurate to avoid drops in visibility.

These steps don’t just make your listing live — they make it discoverable. The more relevant details you include, the more search results you’ll appear in.

Instant Book On: Airbnb states that the speed of accepting a booking request affects ranking on the platform. 40% of guests expect the listing to be bookable immediately. Consider activating Instant Book for each listing, particularly if you're not responding promptly to booking requests. This will lead to higher search visibility of your listing.

1. Sign up to Airbnb as a host

Sign up to Airbnb using your email address, Facebook or Google. It doesn’t matter if you use the same email address as your guest account.

Press “Airbnb your home” to get started with the listing process.

Personal host info page at Airbnb

2. Choose a listing category

Choose the airbnb category that best matches your property type and the travellers you wish to attract.

Airbnb listing categories

Add the general listing information like guest capacity and available bed and bathrooms. 

3. Сraft outstanding titles and descriptions

Just because decent listing titles can generate clicks and revenue doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write a compelling one. Use a title template like this to make a solid, informative headline:

 [Type of property] + [Location] + [Benefit]

Your listing description should be both selling and qualifying. Shape it in the form of a story of someone staying at your place, doing some house walk-through, going out, bathing, tanning, watching TV and so on.  

Don’t hesitate to note certain restrictions such as refraining from parties and adhering to cleaning schedules.

Airbnb listing description step

3. Prepare quality listing photos

More than 60% of bookings on Airbnb originate from the press of a thumbnail photo. Your listing photos should be: 

• Minimum 5 photos (best practice is 3-4 photos per each room)
• Both interior and exterior pictures 
• Light and engaging photos
• Show magnet amenities on the thumbnail photo (animal, sea, view, etc.)

Pro tip. Hire a professional photographer. According to Airbnb 75% of hosts that choose to do it have earned back the photography fees in only one day.

Listing photo upload step on Airbnb

• poor lighting (raise brightness or exposure of your photos)
• narrow field camera view (for a spacious and inviting listing)

Wide angle photography tells more about your vacation rental property

As a Your.Rentals customer, you can get free access to an AI tool that helps you enhance and lighten your photographs. It also gives useful tips when you try to shoot the new photographs on your own. 

4. Set the basic listing price

Your Airbnb nightly rate should be based on:

• Similar listings in your area
• Seasonal demand changes

Airbnb will suggest a rate based on information that you’ve entered earlier in the signup process such as location, accommodation type and guest capacity. You can also check our best European locations study to compare the rate levels in Italy, Spain and France.

Don't sweat it if you’re unsure about what price point to aim for as you will be able to change it at a later date.

5. Enable dynamic pricing

Dynamic pricing is no-brainer for the short-term rentals industry in 2024. But Pricelabs, AirDNA or Beyond Pricing could be costly for the beginners. 

Pro tip. At Your.Rentals, you can use Pricelabs dynamic pricing or AirDNA smart rates for free. 

After you create a listing on Your.Rentals, you just need to set the minimum and maximum prices for your rate changes. The artificial intelligence will predict and adjust prices autonomously based on the daily, weekly and seasonal trends in your area.

Your.Rentals dynamic pricing settings

6. Set price discounts

In the Airbnb interface you have the opportunity to activate: 

• new listing promotion (20%)
• weekly discount and (0-20%)
• monthly discount (0-20%)

Use them wisely. This is a great way to incentivise longer stays. The discounts normally pay for themselves when you take reduced cleaning fees and manual labour into account. 

Think about adding mobile rate discounts. It's a minimum 10% flat discount on the overall price of your listing that helps you get better positions in search results of mobile browsers. 

Users sessions from mobile phones tend to be shorter than those on desktop and have a higher likelihood of resulting in reservations. Read our detailed blog post about mobile rate discounts.

Airbnb discounts step of listing creation

7. Review your new listing

You’ve now successfully created a Airbnb listing, congratulations! This is a good time to set up listing availability in the calendar and double check cancellation policies.

More on things related to cancellation policies and minor useful tips read in our Airbnb host checklist article. 

8. Verifying your Airbnb listing is published

It might take 1-3 days for a new listing to get published on Airbnb. Navigate to your Host dashboard > Listings and check the status of your newly created listing:

• Active, Listed - the listing is live and visible to guests.
• Unlisted, Paused, Deactivated - not visible.

Airbnb might choose to verify your new listing physically. The verification method could be different:

1. Take 2 photos from the property
2. Take 3 videos of the property
3. Ask someone else to verify (you can email to a person with a physical access to the property to ask him do the verification)
4. Provide some documentation: utility bill, residential lease agreement, mortgage statement, property tax ID, or HOA membership. 
5. Security code: mail with the code needs to be received at the property address (not by a package delivery). 

You may continue editing your listing information, like photos and amenities while it is being verified.

Cost to list on Airbnb

Does Airbnb charge a fee for listing on their platform?

No, it is completely free to set up and get started with Airbnb. You can list as many listings as you want without paying a single thing. Airbnb takes a 14-16% fee every time a guest books a listing through the platform.

Airbnb hosts can select the fee structure:

• split-fee
• host-only fee 

The split-fee entails, as the name implies, that both the host and the guest split the amount owed to Airbnb. These fees can vary depending on local laws but normally fall somewhere in the area of 3% for the host and 14% for the guests. 

The host-only fee means that the host pays the total amount owed by themself, this amount is also prone to vary depending on where you are located but it's typically around 14-16% of the listing price.

Airbnb listings FAQ

What is the cost of listing (management) on Airbnb?

Zero. Listing a property on Airbnb is a cost-free process. Hosts can create an enticing listing, upload photos, detail their property and establish rates without any initial costs. Expenses (and sometimes penalties) come into play only when you as a host begin accepting bookings.

What percentage does Airbnb take?

Airbnb will deduct approximately 15% from the total listing price, regardless of the fee structure that you select as host (split-fee/host-only fee).

What are the rules for listing on Airbnb?

Airbnb has four ground rules for its hosts:

• Reservation Commitment - Hosts must honour the reservations they accept.
• Timely Communication - Hosts should communicate promptly with guests.
• Listing Accuracy - The information and descriptions provided in the listing should be accurate.
• Listing Cleanliness - The property should be clean and well-maintained for guests.

What is the average you can make from Airbnb?

In Europe the average amount of money an Airbnb host can make is calculated to be around €12.000. However this is a very general estimation as Airbnb hosts can earn a lot more or a lot less depending on many factors (e.g. seasonality, type of property).

How do I increase my ranking on Airbnb?

If you want to improve your ranking on the search result page you should:

• Monitor and update you listing regularly
• Add amenities used as filters on Airbnb
• Enable instant booking
• Grow and maintain listing quality

Conclusion

Airbnb’s 2024 updates emphasised mainly listing quality and guest satisfaction. Hosts must ensure their listings meet these new standards to thrive in a competitive market.

So, set up listings accurately, optimise for search filters, and utilise available features such as instant booking and amenities.

If you feel stuck - don’t hesitate to contact our free and friendly support in your local language at Your.Rentals!