Airbnb Plus may have hurt some hosts more than it helped, new Cornell study finds

Airbnb’s old “Airbnb Plus” program was designed to spotlight high-quality homes, but new research suggests that the program may have created unexpected winners and losers.

According to a new study from Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, hosts who earned Airbnb’s “Plus” certification benefited from increased visibility, while many listings left out of the program saw demand decline as travelers gravitated toward approved properties.

In short, the certification program cost noncertified Los Angeles hosts revenue, even though Plus listings made up just 3 percent of the city’s supply.

The program, which launched in LA in 2018 to certify homes meeting strict design and cleanliness standards, unintentionally made properties without the badge seem riskier to travelers.

“By explicitly labeling some homes as ‘verified,’ Airbnb unintentionally made the lack of verification stand out more sharply for everyone else,” said Heeyon Kim, assistant professor at Cornell’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration. ““Certification programs are usually designed to build trust. On digital platforms like Airbnb, where guests can’t physically inspect what they’re buying, trust matters.”

“We found that Airbnb Plus homes were labeled ‘verified’ and marketed as more predictable and hotel-like,” Kim continued. “In theory, this should help everyone: Guests feel safer on the platform, certified hosts earn more, and uncertified hosts benefit from the platform’s improved reputation, but our research suggests otherwise.”

What happened next somewhat backfired on the platform.

Some guests didn’t downgrade to cheaper Airbnbs when faced with uncertainty. Instead, they left the platform entirely, which was easy to do in cities like Los Angeles as there were abundant hotel alternatives available.

Which hosts survived the certification squeeze

Listings with high ratings or extensive guest feedback suffered less because reviews acted as an alternative signal of quality, countering the missing Plus badge, the study found.

Meanwhile, homes that weren’t directly comparable to Plus listings because of price range saw smaller losses, as did properties harder to replace with hotels or off-platform options.

Related: Wall Street says Airbnb could benefit from AI and major sports deals

The research team compared Los Angeles, which received Airbnb Plus in February 2018, with San Diego, which didn’t get the program until fall.

Airbnb officially ended the now extinct program in 2023 after quietly scaling it back years earlier.

“If a certification program harms most participants while helping a small subset, it risks alienating the base that powers the marketplace,” Kim said, adding that policymakers need to examine certification’s full distributional effects, not just headline benefits.