Airbnb has become a five-star hotel,
and your listing has to keep up

When Airbnb started, the idea was simple: you rented out someone's home, and it felt like someone's home. Over the past few years we have watched that change almost completely. Guests now arrive with the expectations they would bring to a hotel, and they judge the stay by hotel standards. We currently manage around fifteen holiday rentals on the Costa del Sol, many of which we also sold to the owner and then set up for letting from scratch, so we see this shift week by week. If your approach is still to photograph your property the way you live in it and put it online, you are going to struggle. Not because the property is bad, but because the bar has moved.

The clearest way to see the shift is to compare what a guest used to accept with what a guest now assumes before they have even arrived.

One part of the original idea has survived, and it is the good part. Guests still want a host who knows the area and will point them to the right restaurant or beach. We are happy to do that, and it is a genuine pleasure. What has changed is everything around it.

The clearest sign of the shift is what guests stop thanking you for.

In every property we manage we leave a guest book, a bottle of champagne and a bottle of water. A few years ago that earned a mention in the review. Now it does not get mentioned at all, because guests expect it. The same has happened with shampoo, with beach towels, with dishwasher tablets, with properly made beds.

That is the important part to understand. These things have stopped earning you praise, but their absence still earns you complaints. There is no upside left, only downside. And nothing stops a property from renting faster than negative reviews.

The items owners forget are rarely the expensive ones. They are the small, unglamorous things a guest only notices when they are missing:

A sample of what guests ask us for, on properties that are, in the end, private homes:

In practice this means being on the Airbnb chat or WhatsApp constantly. A message that sits unanswered for six hours reads, to a guest, as a host who does not care, and that judgement tends to surface in the review rather than in the conversation.

There is a limit, and knowing where it sits is part of managing a property properly.

Take the duvet example. Most of our double beds are made up with a single double duvet. Some guests do not want to sleep under the same duvet as the person beside them, and ask for extra linen. Usually we cannot provide it, because there are two sets of linen per property: one in use and one with the cleaner. That is by design, not an oversight.

We are not going to go back to an owner and tell them their linen is insufficient, or ask them to absorb a cost that belongs to the guest's preference rather than to the property. What the guest booked is what the listing describes.

Which is exactly why the listing has to describe it. We now state the bedding situation in every listing: bed sizes, the duvet arrangement, what linen is provided. A guest who knows in advance does not complain. A guest who finds out on arrival does.

Because they will. Accuracy is the cheapest improvement an owner can make, and the one most often skipped. Be specific about:

Vague listings do not protect you. They move the disappointment to the moment of arrival, where it turns into a review.

Guests are no longer looking for someone else's home. They are looking for a clean, tidy, neutral space that photographs the way a hotel room photographs. Personal items, family photos, a cluttered worktop, a drying rack in the corner: all of it reads as somebody's house rather than a place worth paying for.

Professional photography is not a luxury here. It is the difference between a listing people click on and a listing they scroll straight past, and your click-through rate is what feeds everything else.

The presentation then has to hold up in person. Beds properly made, towels folded, the property genuinely spotless at check-in. The photos set an expectation and the arrival either confirms it or breaks it.

We like to personalise a guest's stay wherever we can. Cleaning is the deliberate exception.

A cleaner works across a lot of apartments. Expecting them to remember that one owner wants the cushions arranged a particular way, or that another has a preference about where the towels go, is setting them up to fail. So we do not take on listings where the owner wants their property cleaned differently from the rest. The standard is simple and it is the same everywhere: the property is clean.

To make that hold week after week, our cleaners work from a written checklist and sign it off after every turnover. That way we know what was done rather than assuming it. It sounds bureaucratic for a holiday apartment. It is also why we do not get cleaning complaints.

This is the part owners underestimate.

We had a property where a guest could not work out how to use the Airbnb app. The check-in instructions were in the app, clearly, where they always are. He never found them, and wrote in his review that check-in had been very difficult.

The next enquiry we received said: I see check-in was difficult, can you send me the instructions in advance? One review, about something that was not wrong with the property at all, had become the first thing prospective guests asked about.

The arithmetic makes it worse early on. With three reviews, a single four-star review pulls your average somewhere it takes months to climb back from. With eighty reviews, the same review barely registers. So the period when you have the least experience and the least help is exactly the period when a mistake costs you the most.

The shift is not only about cost. Airbnb now lets hosts charge for additional services, and guests are entirely used to paying for extras the way they would at a hotel.

One of the apartments we manage has a jacuzzi and a sauna on the patio, and we charge separately for their use. Guests do not find this strange, because it matches how they already think about accommodation: a base rate, plus whatever you choose to add. Early check-in and late check-out fall into the same category.

Handled well, this is an income stream that did not exist a few years ago. It only works if the property has something worth charging for and the listing communicates it clearly, before the booking rather than after.

That combination is the whole argument of this article in a single example. None of the four elements works on its own. Good photos with the wrong price still sit empty. The right price with slow communication still collects mediocre reviews.

Not every owner wants to run what is effectively a small hospitality business, and it is worth being honest about that. If you use the property yourself for much of the year, or you would rather not deal with the pace of guest communication, mid-term rental of 31 days or more is a reasonable alternative rather than a consolation prize. It sits under standard Spanish tenancy law, needs no tourist licence, and asks far less of you day to day.

There is also a step that comes before any of this. Short-term letting is only possible if the town hall and your community of owners both allow it, and the rules changed significantly in 2025. If you have not checked where your property stands, start with our guide to getting a rental licence on the Costa del Sol.

The mistake is choosing short-term letting and then treating it casually. That is the combination that produces empty calendars.

If you take nothing else from this article, work through these in order:

• 1
  Book a professional photographer Clear the property of personal items first, make the beds properly and shoot on a bright day. This is the single change with the largest effect on bookings.
• 2
  Rewrite the listing with real detail Bed sizes, bedding arrangement, toiletries, beach towels, kitchen equipment, parking and access. State what is not there as well as what is.
• 3
  Walk the property as a guest would Arrive with a suitcase, try to check in using only the instructions you provide, and note everything missing. Pegs, iron, drying rack, travel cot, spare bin bags.
• 4
  Standardise the clean One written checklist, signed off after every turnover, identical for every stay. Include restocking the consumables.
• 5
  Fix your response times Decide who is answering messages and how quickly. If nobody can commit to replying within the hour during the day, you need help.
• 6
  Review the pricing properly Not last year's rate with a small increase, and not simply what the neighbour charges. Price by season, by demand and by what your property genuinely offers.
• 7
  Decide what you will charge extra for Early check-in, late check-out, a jacuzzi or sauna, transfers. Put it in the listing so guests see it before they book.