Every guest arrives to check your work.
A marketplace listing is read by someone who may never see the item. An Airbnb listing is read by someone who will be standing inside it within a fortnight, with a review form waiting.
This is the one listing you should not make more appealing.
Every other kind of advert rewards persuasion. This one punishes it, on a delay. A listing that oversells wins the booking and then loses the accuracy rating, and the accuracy rating is not a comment — it feeds ranking, which is every future booking. The guest is not comparing your flat to other flats. They are comparing it to the listing.
So the thing worth paying for here is not better copy. It is finding the four or five gaps between what your listing implies and what a guest will find, and closing them before someone else closes them in public. Three flights of stairs. A sofa-bed counted as a bedroom. A shared stairwell. A shower over the bath. A street that is loud at the weekend.
There is a wrong way to do this too, and the report is written to avoid it. "The stairs may be difficult for some guests" is not a disclosure, it is an insurance policy, and a guest reads it as one. "Three flights, 48 steps, handrail throughout, no lift" is a disclosure. Specificity is the entire difference: it lets the wrong guest self-select out before they book instead of after they arrive.
Airbnb's own ground rules require the place to match the photos and description, all advertised amenities to be available, and access restrictions to be disclosed. Its standards also prohibit inaccurate location information and images edited to hide flaws or add amenities. Most hosts who fail this are not being dishonest; they are describing the place they know rather than the place a stranger walks into.
A real listing, before and after.
From the Airbnb rubric behind the job. Nothing in the first version is a lie.
Stunning Luxury Apartment in the Heart of Edinburgh ★
Welcome to our beautiful home from home! This stunning apartment is perfectly located in the heart of the city, just moments from all the best attractions, bars and restaurants. Sleeps 6 comfortably in 2 bedrooms. Fully equipped modern kitchen, spacious living area, everything you need for the perfect stay. Guests love the cosy atmosphere and amazing location!
House rules: No parties. No smoking. No pets. No unregistered guests. No noise after 10pm. No shoes inside. Check in 4pm, check out 10am strictly.
Top-floor 2-bed, 6 min walk to Waverley — 3 flights, no lift
A second-floor tenement flat five to six minutes' walk from Waverley station, good for couples, a family of four, or two couples who don't mind one pair being on a sofa-bed. It is not right for anyone who can't manage stairs: three flights, 48 steps, with a handrail throughout, and there is no lift.
The space. Bedroom one: double bed, door locks, window to the rear courtyard. Bedroom two: two single beds, [ADD FACT: does this door lock?]. The sixth sleeping space is a double sofa-bed in the living room — comfortable for a couple, but it is a sofa-bed in a shared room, not a third bedroom.
House rules. No parties — the flat below is occupied and these are wooden floors. No smoking anywhere in the building. Please keep noise down after 10pm for the same reason.
Licence. [MUST SUPPLY: your Scottish short-term let licence number, exactly as your council issued it — it must be displayed on the listing]
The title now carries the differentiator and the disqualifier in the same fifty characters. Six minutes to Waverley sells it; three flights and no lift sends the wrong booking somewhere else, which is the point.
Eight bare prohibitions became three rules with a reason each. A wall of "no" reads as a difficult host; "no parties — the flat below is occupied and these are wooden floors" reads as a person, and gets followed more reliably.
"Guests love the cosy atmosphere" is gone because it is host copy quoting imaginary guests. Review language belongs to reviewers. And "fully equipped modern kitchen" became a request for the actual appliance list, because that is precisely the claim a guest tests on night one.
What you get.
- Paste the listing. Title, description, the sleeping arrangement as you have it written, house rules, and anything in your "other things to note". If you have a licence or registration number requirement where you are, say so — it will ask for the number rather than write around it.
- Top up once. This job uses never more than 40p and spends only what the report costs, leaving the rest on your balance. A change is another go at the job and costs pence too, which is usually what it takes to get the tone of the house rules right.
- Back comes an expectation audit. A score, the single biggest gap between listing and reality named first, a rewritten title and description in Airbnb's structured sections, and a list of things only you can confirm — the walk time, the appliances, whether the second bedroom door locks.
A generation that fails spends nothing.
Fit.
Worth doing if
- Your accuracy rating is lower than your other ratings, and you cannot see why.
- Your listing says "sleeps 6" and one of those six is a sofa-bed.
- You have stairs, a shared entrance, a bath-shower or street noise and have never mentioned any of them.
- Your house rules are a list of prohibitions with no reasons attached.
- You are about to list for the first time and want the promises checked before anyone can test them.
Not worth doing if
- You want the copy made warmer without the disclosures added. That is the trade this job refuses to make.
- You want a walking distance filled in. It does not know where your flat is and will ask.
- Your licence or registration is the actual problem. It will tell you the number belongs on the listing; it cannot get you one.
- Your photographs are the weak part. It reads words, and it will say so rather than compensating with adjectives.
What hosts ask before changing a word.
Can I count the sofa-bed as a bedroom?
No, and it is the first failure on the list for this job because it produces the review you cannot recover from. A party of six who booked a three-bedroom flat and find two bedrooms and a sofa in the lounge did not get what they booked, and Airbnb's ground rules require the listing to match what was booked. The sofa-bed is a real asset and worth describing as precisely what it is: where it stands, how it opens, and who it genuinely suits.
Do I have to mention the stairs?
Yes. Access restrictions are named in the ground rules as something to disclose, and silence about stairs, lifts and level access is a listed failure that costs more than it saves. The guest who would have been fine with three flights books anyway. The guest who cannot manage them arrives at midnight with a suitcase and no lift. State the number of flights, whether there is a lift, and whether the entrance has a step. A steep staircase disclosed by you stays a fact; found by them it becomes the review.
Do I need a licence number on a Scottish listing?
Short-term let licensing in Scotland requires the licence number to appear on every listing and advert. It will not supply one, validate one, reformat one, or tell you that you do not need one — the number is printed exactly as you give it, and where you have not given it, it comes back as a required gap naming what is missing. Whether a scheme applies to you is a question for your licensing authority. A listing silent about it is missing a legally required identifier, and that is the defect.
Does my cleaning fee affect where I appear in search?
The arbitrage it used to enable has largely gone. Since April 2025 the total price including cleaning and service fees is what guests see by default, so a low nightly rate propped up by a high cleaning fee no longer buys the position it once did and now reads as a trick at the moment of booking. UK price transparency guidance has moved the same way. Price the stay rather than the headline. What Airbnb says it ranks on is quality, popularity, price and location.
Can I edit the photographs to tidy the place up?
Tidying before you photograph, yes. Editing afterwards to hide damage or add an amenity is specifically barred by the ground rules, and it produces the arrival that ends in a claim. The subtler version is the photograph that is merely old: a kitchen since replaced, a garden in a summer three years back, a window that now faces scaffolding. Stale photographs are a listed failure for the same reason as edited ones, because the guest booked the picture.
Is it a problem that the bathroom is shared?
Only if you do not say so. Undisclosed shared anything — bathroom, kitchen, entrance, washing machine, driveway — is on the failure list, and it is the most common reason a guest feels misled by a listing that was otherwise accurate. Plenty of guests actively want the cheaper shared option. Nobody wants to discover it on arrival. Say what is shared, with whom, and when.
My house rules run to a page and a half.
A wall of prohibitions with no reasons attached is a listed failure, and it reads to a guest as a host who has had a bad year. The same rules land completely differently with a clause of why against them: quiet after eleven because the neighbours are elderly, shoes off because the floor is original. It will not invent a house rule you have not stated, and where it thinks one is missing it raises it as something for you to add rather than writing it in itself.
How do I make it sound better than the flat down the road?
By describing the stay rather than the property, which is the last failure on the list and the one separating a listing that converts from an inventory. A guest is not buying a two-bedroom flat, they are buying the morning they will have in it: where the light falls, how long to the station on foot, what is open at eight o'clock. What it will not do is invent any of that — no distances, no walking times, no transport links, no promises about the neighbourhood — so the specifics have to come from you.
Have the promise checked.
Paste the listing as a guest sees it. The first thing back is the gap that costs you most.
Top up once. No subscription. About 28p — never more than 40p.