Airbnb aims to expand the offering of accessible homes

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Airbnb focuses on accessible tourism. With new accessibility filters and a file
Dedicated team for manual verification of the offered features. All with the aim of increasing the supply, for Italy, by rewarding the first thousand new hosts of accessible homes with travel credits. The occasion to launch the new message through the platform, which today has 4 million hosts (1 billion guests counted), was Disability Day, which is considered an “opportunity to address the issue of accessibility”.

awareness

The new initiatives, which have been in operation since November 9, follow the “Free2Travel” awareness campaign, launched by the Diversity Foundation to promote a culture of travel and hospitality that is “increasingly inclusive and a partnership with Fish”. Specifically, as explained by the portal, “All ads with accessibility features are manually checked by a dedicated Airbnb team that verifies all information entered by and by hosts.” So far, Airbnb’s group of agents “has already checked and confirmed the accuracy of more than 100,000 accessibility features spread across 25,000 properties around the world.”

New search filters

With the new system, the 13 accessibility search filters have been updated, made more visible and more detailed, to help travelers more easily find accommodation that suits their needs. Example? The ‘large entrance to the bedroom’ feature has been replaced by the ‘entrance to the bedroom over 81 cm wide’.

Experiments

11 internal filters allow you to find experiences without difficulty. They range from those for manual references to those that do not provide for stairs or steps or that allow free access for caregivers of persons with disabilities. Also, in this case, the descriptions will be manually checked by a specialized team to verify their quality.

New Hosts Initiative

The portal recently launched an initiative targeting hosts to increase the offer of accessible homes. From November 20 to December 30, 2021, hosts of the first 1,000 ads that have added certain accessibility features that have been verified by a dedicated team for accuracy – as noted by Airbnb – will receive a travel credit for each correctly updated ad. Airbnb from 50 euros.