Airbnb ‘Guest Favorite’ Badge – What It Is & How to Get It

The guest favorite Airbnb designation is one of the most significant trust signals a host can earn on the platform — and it works very differently from anything Airbnb has offered before.

Introduced as part of Airbnb's Winter 2023 update, it gives top-performing listings a prominent visual badge that appears in search results and directly on the listing page, designed to build guest confidence and drive more bookings.

Watch the full video above or keep reading for the complete breakdown.

What Is the Guest Favorite Airbnb Badge?

Airbnb launched the Guest Favorite designation as part of its Winter 2023 platform update. It's a special badge that appears in three places: in Airbnb search results, at the top of your listing page, and further down on the listing itself. Unlike a small icon tucked in a corner, this is a large, colorful banner — hard to miss.

The purpose is straightforward. Airbnb wants to help travelers quickly identify properties that consistently deliver exceptional experiences. For hosts, it's a competitive signal that says: guests have loved staying here, repeatedly and reliably.

It's important to understand that this is a listing-level designation, not an account-level one. If you manage three properties and one earns the badge, the other two don't automatically get it. Each listing has to earn its own Guest Favorite status independently. For co-hosts and property managers overseeing multiple listings, this raises the stakes — and the opportunity.

Guests can also filter Airbnb search results to show only Guest Favorite properties. That filter alone represents a meaningful traffic channel for hosts who qualify. If a traveler is already inclined to book a verified top performer, your listing is either in that filtered set or it's invisible.

To understand how this fits into Airbnb's broader platform strategy, the Airbnb Winter 2023 Updates covered several other changes that also affect how listings rank and convert.

Guest Favorite vs. Superhost: Key Differences

Most experienced hosts will immediately ask: isn't this just Superhost with a new name? The answer is no — and the differences matter.

Superhost status applies to a hosting account. Hit the required thresholds (4.8+ rating, 10+ stays per year, 90%+ response rate, sub-1% cancellation rate) and every listing on your account benefits. Miss one metric and you lose it for all of them. It's a fixed, transparent checklist.

Guest Favorite works differently in almost every way:

• Listing-level, not account-level — each property earns or loses it independently
• No fixed threshold — there's no single checklist you can complete to guarantee the badge
• Competitive by design — only the top 2 million most-loved listings on Airbnb qualify at any given time
• Relative, not absolute — you can lose the badge even if your quality doesn't drop, simply because competitors improve
• Far more visible — Superhost was a small badge most guests didn't notice or understand; Guest Favorite is a prominent color banner on the listing page

That last point is significant. Years of Superhost status existed as a designation that most travelers scrolled right past. Guest Favorite is designed to be noticed — both in search and on the listing itself.

For hosts building a co-hosting or property management business, this distinction is worth understanding deeply. Airbnb Hosting vs. Co-hosting vs. Investing breaks down the different paths available and how performance metrics like this affect each one.

How to Get Guest Favorite on Airbnb

Here's the honest answer on how to get Guest Favorite on Airbnb: there's no single switch to flip. Airbnb hasn't published a specific formula, and that's intentional. The designation reflects holistic excellence — not just one strong metric.

What is known is that Airbnb evaluates listings across multiple dimensions to determine which properties earn the airbnb guest favorite badge. Based on what Airbnb has shared publicly, the path includes:

1. Exceptional overall star ratings — qualifying properties average above 4.9 stars. That's near-perfect, meaning even a handful of 4-star reviews can push a listing out of contention.
2. Low guest issue escalation rate — fewer than 1% of stays should result in issues being escalated to Airbnb support. This includes host cancellations and trip quality complaints.
3. Strong ratings in individual categories — guests rate listings on cleanliness, accuracy, check-in, communication, location, and value. All of these feed into the algorithm, not just the overall score.
4. Volume of reviews — properties with more reviews have more data for Airbnb to evaluate. A listing with 200 five-star reviews carries more signal than one with 15.

There's no shortcut here. How to become Guest Favorite on Airbnb comes down to building systems that consistently produce outstanding guest experiences — then maintaining those systems at scale.

Pro tip: Pay particular attention to your value and cleanliness subcategory scores. These are often the ones that drag down an otherwise strong listing. A 5.0 overall average can coexist with a 4.6 on value if guests feel pricing was slightly off — and that subcategory rating matters.

The Criteria and Benchmarks You Need to Know

To understand what's actually required, it helps to look at the benchmarks Airbnb has shared for airbnb guest favorites.

On average, Guest Favorite listings on Airbnb have an overall rating above 4.9 stars and a guest issue rate of 1% or lower.

A 1% guest issue rate sounds easy until you do the math. If you host 100 stays per year, that means you can afford exactly one escalated complaint — maximum. Host 200 stays and you get two. Every unresolved issue that makes it to Airbnb support counts against you.

This is why proactive guest communication is so critical. When something goes wrong (and it will), resolving it directly with the guest before they escalate to Airbnb keeps that issue off your record. A broken coffee maker replaced within the hour is a 5-star review. The same issue ignored for two days is a support ticket.

For practical tips on communication systems that prevent escalations, automating guest communication can help hosts stay responsive without being glued to their phones around the clock.

The competitive pool is also worth understanding. Airbnb has more than 7 million active listings globally. Only 2 million earn Guest Favorite status at any given moment — that's roughly the top 28%. It's achievable, but it requires being meaningfully better than the majority of listings in your market.

How the Badge Impacts Bookings and Visibility

The practical question every host asks: does the badge actually move the needle on bookings?

The honest answer is that the data is still developing. But there are strong structural reasons to believe it has a real impact — and several of them stack on top of each other.

In search results: The badge appears before a guest clicks through to your listing. Travelers scanning a grid of results can see at a glance which properties carry the designation. Higher click-through rates mean more eyeballs on your listing — even before any conversion happens.

On the listing page: Unlike the old Superhost badge (a small icon most guests missed), the Guest Favorite banner is a prominent visual element near the top of the listing. A second, larger banner appears further down the page. These placements are designed to reinforce trust at the moment a guest is deciding whether to book.

The filter effect: Guests can search exclusively for Guest Favorite properties. For hosts who qualify, this means appearing in a reduced competitive set — fewer listings competing for a traveler who's already filtered for quality.

There's also a causation vs. correlation question worth acknowledging. Hosts who earn the badge are, by definition, doing exceptional work. Better hosts tend to get better reviews, attract repeat guests, and show up higher in search anyway. Separating the badge's effect from the underlying quality that earned it is difficult.

But that's not really the point — doing the work that earns the badge is what produces results, badge or no badge.

Want to understand the other factors that drive listing visibility? Airbnb SEO secrets covers how the platform's search algorithm works and what hosts can do to improve their ranking.

Is It Actually Worth Chasing?

Should hosts obsess over earning airbnb favorites status the way some obsess over Superhost? Probably not — and here's why.

The behaviors that earn Guest Favorite are exactly the behaviors that make a successful STR business in the first place. Consistently clean properties. Responsive communication. Accurate listings. Fair pricing. Fast resolution of issues. These aren't things you do for the badge — they're the foundation of the business.

BNB Mastery recommends treating Guest Favorite as a benchmark, not a goal. If you're doing everything right and the badge follows, great. If you're doing everything right and a competitor edges you out in a given quarter, don't lose sleep over it. Your underlying performance metrics still drive bookings.

What hosts should avoid is making decisions that hurt the guest experience in pursuit of the badge. Accepting every booking to inflate stay counts, then cutting corners on cleanliness to reduce costs — that's a path to lower ratings, not a Guest Favorite designation.

For hosts looking to sharpen every aspect of their listing performance, connecting with other experienced operators in the BNB Tribe community gives you real-world strategies from hosts actively managing Guest Favorite properties in 2026.

How to Keep Your Guest Favorite Status Long-Term

Earning the badge is one challenge. Keeping it is another.

Because Guest Favorite is competitive and relative, it's possible to lose the designation without doing anything wrong — simply because other listings in your market improved. This is different from Superhost, where hitting fixed thresholds locks in your status for the quarter.

To hold onto the designation over time, hosts should focus on:

• Consistent cleanliness standards — the single biggest driver of 5-star reviews across all markets and property types
• Accurate listing descriptions and photos — guests who arrive expecting one thing and find another leave disappointed reviews, regardless of the actual quality
• Responsive communication — Airbnb tracks response rates, but more importantly, guests notice when hosts are present and helpful
• Issue resolution before escalation — build a process for addressing guest problems immediately, ideally before checkout
• Subcategory score monitoring — if your value score is slipping, it may be time to adjust pricing or add amenities that justify your rate

Investing in the right amenities can also make a meaningful difference in subcategory scores, particularly for cleanliness, value, and overall experience. The amenities that drive guest bookings is a practical starting point for identifying quick wins.

Pricing also plays into the value subcategory. If guests consistently rate value lower than other categories, your pricing strategy may need a second look. Airbnb pricing hacks covers specific strategies for keeping your rates competitive without undercutting your revenue.

Finally, if you're managing properties for other owners as a co-host, Guest Favorite status on those listings reflects directly on your business reputation. For hosts building that kind of operation, BNB Mastery's Co-Hosting Program provides a structured framework for managing listings at the quality level required to earn and maintain top designations across a portfolio.

Final Thoughts on the Guest Favorite Designation

The guest favorite Airbnb badge is a genuinely meaningful addition to the platform — not just marketing. A prominent visual trust signal in search results and on listing pages, combined with a dedicated guest filter, gives qualifying listings a real structural advantage over the competition in 2026.

The path to earning it isn't a checklist. It's a commitment to running an exceptional short-term rental operation: near-perfect ratings across every subcategory, a sub-1% issue escalation rate, and enough review volume to demonstrate that excellence is consistent, not occasional.

Hosts who focus on the fundamentals — clean properties, responsive communication, honest listings, and fast issue resolution — will find themselves in contention for Guest Favorite without ever treating it as the primary goal. The badge follows the work. Do the work, and the designation tends to take care of itself.