AirBNB API is broken and they blame hosts for revenue loss

BadPirate
4 min readAug 23, 2022

If you use a service that uses AirBNB’s official API to help you manage your vacation rental, and you have noticed less bookings or a lack of new bookings on your calendar (since June) you should check a few things. As the Update broke a LOT of things. See this post from price setting utility “Use Wheelhouse” for an detailed list, but in short, If you want to use any 3rd party tool to help manage your listing, the API migration broke a litany of existing features:

  • Linked calendars are removed and will not sync! (breaking your ability to host with multiple partners)
  • Automatic pricing rules on AirBNB are broken and removed
  • Only one 3rd party tool at a time
  • You can not “Co-Host” a listing
  • Instant booking must be turned on
  • Does not work with AirBNB plus

Worse off, these things break with no notification from AirBNB of the issues, and in non intuitive ways. Sure… you can still set your calendar availability as blocked by default (allowing hosts to manually open dates on their calendar for booking) but the dates will be quietly re-blocked after you open them.

Dates Unavailable by Default won’t work

I discovered all this back in June when I became suspicious at the lack of bookings for August (normally a hot month…

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BadPirate
BadPirate

Written by BadPirate

Kevin Lohman, Software Engineer, Father, Story Teller, and former US Navy Sailor (who never set foot on a ship)

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