The company launched a new booking process on Thursday called "Match" that aims to make searching and booking rooms more efficient. Instead of asking you to find rooms through filtered searches and to message hosts individually, the new tool automates some of the work.
Match recommends places to stay based on criteria such as location, room type and amenities, and presents a slideshow of options that you can vote up or down. When finished sorting, you can then mass-message your favorite hosts for pre-approval.
My favorite part of the new tool: an option that will automatically send pre-approval requests to hosts of similar spaces, if the ones you chose don't work out.
Airbnb says Match makes booking accommodations on the site three times faster. It's hard to say how it determined that figure. In my test, I received a pre-approval for my mass-messaged sample request within an hour. Not too bad.
Will you use Airbnb Match? Were you wary of using the service before? Let us know in the comments.
