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Airbnb Driving Directions: Google Map Yourself

Are your guests getting lost?

Sound Familiar?

Pesky Problem

Your guests have bad driving directions to your Airbnb.

Story time. There were two ways to reach the Airbnb hidden amongst the pine trees. There was the fully paved road. And then there was the Swiss cheese road. The Swiss cheese road was once fully paved, but now was roughly 50% asphalt and 50% potholes, each one a knee-high cliff encircling a muddy crater the width of a yardstick.

We’d never seen anything like this road. Dirt roads? Sure. Gravel roads? Sure. But this was new. It was like driving through a whack-a-mole obstacle course trying not to fall through. And while the local heavy duty trucks confidently bounced through the landscape, our two-door hatchback was less self-assured.

But Google didn’t know about the Swiss cheese. Plus the fully paved road added 0.25 miles to the journey. So, of course, Google Maps guided us off the pavement and onto the roller coaster. And we blindly followed.

Let's Try This

Bite-Size Solution

Google Map yourself.

No host wants this type of arrival for their guests. What a crappy prelude to all the goodness you’ve arranged just inside the door. To avoid this type of arrival, it’s time to Google Map yourself. And Apple map yourself. And MapQuest yourself. Your goal is to understand what your guests experience when they receive directions to your place.

Meet Vanessa, a savvy host in Florida whose directions include a little extra detail: “Please be aware there is a duplicate address in Lake Placid. If using GPS, be sure to select the Sebring location.” Brilliant. How did she find out that there was a nearly identical address just 20 miles down the road? One of her very first guests accidentally selected the wrong one and wound up at the wrong place.

Now, is this her fault? Of course not. But instead of being defensive, Vanessa went into problem solving mode. She replicated the error to better understand where this guest had gone wrong, and added a guard rail to her instructions to help prevent future guests from making the same frustrating mistake.

This little extra effort is the epitome of generous, proactive hosting: putting systems in place to help each guest have the best possible experience while simultaneously minimizing the number of hosting headaches down the road.

5 Minutes

Here's Your First Step

Look up directions to your place from the most popular starting points.

You guessed it. Time to Google map yourself. Pull up the go-to GPS apps and plug in your Airbnb as the destination. Then populate the starting point with the most popular place your guests come from. Maybe most folks are from a certain metro area. Maybe they’re all coming from the east. Maybe you need to simulate an experiment from all four cardinal directions.

The point is to see whether the directions the app gives you match the directions you’d give a guest yourself. If you stumble across any red flags, add a helpful note or two like Vanessa did to your in-app directions.

INSPIRED BY you

This week’s Big Heart Hosting post was inspired by Vanessa, an Airbnb host in Sebring, Florida, US. Just click here to explore the full listing.

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