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6 Comments

Airbnb falls apart when you don't have specific dates in mind.

I doubt this is unique to me but has anyone figured out an efficient way of working through Airbnb listings when you don't have specific travel dates in mind?

Here's the situation:

  • I'm looking to travel to Tokyo sometime within the next 6 months.
  • I know I want to spend anywhere between 4 - 6 weeks in the city and have a budget of $xx/day.

With Airbnb, you can initiate a search without specific dates in mind, but:

  • There's no way to filter for whether a property has x consecutive days available
  • There's no way to apply a price filter when you don't have dates selected

My process:

  1. Initiate a dateless search
  2. Open interesting listings based on location/pictures
  3. Open the listing's dates and then record available dates, total price, notable listing data (superhost, private room, entire apartment etc), and a link into a Notion table.
  4. I then view the Notion table in a calendar view and select an optimal listing based on total price and dates

This is pretty cumbersome, especially in cities where there isn't a huge supply of budget-friendly Airbnbs (Tokyo 😢).

Has anyone come up with a better way? Does anyone want to build an app to simplify this process 🤔?

posted to Icon for group Digital Nomads
Digital Nomads
on December 9, 2019
  1. 2

    I usually know the rough period in the month when I plan to go and just go with that. (Start, middle or end of the month)

    I agree it would be nice if there was a Skyscanner-like calendar view where you can see the cheapest places that match your criteria...but it might get more complicated than Skyscanner 😀

    1. 1

      Probably the right approach.

      I just have too much FOMO when using Airbnb that I could have landed the perfect spot if only I had changed my date preferences to a week or two earlier.

  2. 2

    Although I've never had the exact same problem that you have had, I do have some other frustrations with Airbnb search.

    I really want to be able to search for beach homes. Anywhere in the U.S. for $x a day. Unfortunately you can't do this, so I spend hours looking at each little and big town along the coast.

    1. 2

      I think that might be even more frustrating than my problem. I can only imagine how many airbnb tabs you probably have open when doing that.

  3. 1

    Hey I see you're interested in Airbnb. So you also may be interested how reservation templates look, I found them so here to check: https://doctempl.com/product-category/booking/

  4. 2

    This comment was deleted 6 years ago.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the link! Super helpful.

      Will definitely look into Osaka. Anywhere else in Japan you would recommend?

      1. 2

        This comment was deleted 6 years ago.

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