Skip to main content
AirDNA Data Updates
T
Written by Tom Williams
Updated over a week ago

This article will be updated periodically to document improvements and changes to AirDNA's data and methodologies.

May 2024

Booking Lead Time Data Improvements (Airbnb only)

With this update, we are improving the identification of booked, blocked, and available nights for Airbnb hosts who utilize the settings of Advanced Notice and Preparation Time between reservations. Historically, some dates were erroneously marked as reservations instead of Advance Notice windows. These dates will now show as available.

In order to help hosts manage their properties, Airbnb introduced the features Advanced notice and Preparation time between reservations. These allow hosts to set a minimum number of days between bookings, ensuring they have enough time to have their property ready to receive each guest.

These features make the selected days unavailable in the listing calendar to ensure no other bookings can be made during those times. AirDNA reports on listing calendars and assesses whether or not the unavailable days were bookings or blocks made by the host.

To make our data even better we have implemented key changes in how we pick up these days and will be applying it to all future dates, as well as retroactively to July 2022. These changes will identify which customers use Advanced notice and Preparation time and adjust the days blocked by the features to be reflected as available in our data.

Our calendar reporting process has many steps, checks, and data points to track. When working with information that is subject to so much change, it can be a challenge to apply the relevant changes to our data methodologies so quickly that inconsistencies occur. With these new changes, our data will be much improved.

Merged / Dual Listing Data Improvements

Following a significant overhaul of our merge logic in November, which changed how we presented data for properties listed in multiple platforms, we are now introducing further improvements to ensure the inclusion of as much data as possible for those listings. This aims to deliver a more dependable and comprehensive overview of a property’s performance.

Many hosts list their property across multiple channels to boost visibility and encourage bookings. This poses a challenge when reporting on these listings, as there are multiple sets of metrics for one property.

AirDNA has a de-duplication algorithm that identifies and matches double listings, giving single performance figures. This algorithm tracks listings on both Airbnb and VRBO. However, we noticed that if a listing were removed from Airbnb, we were not switching to accounting for the VRBO data in our combined data set.

This is especially important for future bookings. When analyzing a dual-listed property, we look at the best-performing channel for future bookings, however, if we don’t see any in that channel, we would not check the other. This is now changing to ensure we do not miss any future reservations on either Airbnb or VRBO.

It will also improve our historical data as we look at each listing and where bookings were made over the last twelve months. So whether bookings were made on Airbnb or VRBO, we will be adding it to our historical figures.

To improve on this, we are changing the way we monitor duplicate listings so that if a listing were to be removed or have its calendar blocked on Airbnb, we would still pick up its VRBO performance and vice versa.

Did this answer your question?