How to Earn the Airbnb Guest Favorites Badge

You earn the Airbnb Guest Favorites badge by collecting at least five guest reviews, holding excellent ratings across the six categories guests score (check-in, cleanliness, accuracy, host communication, location, and value), keeping your conversations with guests on the platform, and protecting a reliability record where host cancellations and quality-related customer service issues sit at about 1% on average. Airbnb evaluates listings automatically, every day, so the badge can appear or disappear without you touching anything (Guest Favorites: Most-loved homes according to guests, Airbnb Help Center).

I have hosted more than 3,000 guests and collected over 1,000 5-star reviews across the portfolio my team manages for other owners, and this badge behaves differently from every other Airbnb status I have chased. It is not something you qualify for once and then hold. It is a rolling verdict on your recent stays, recalculated daily. Below is what moves it, what kills it, and what to do the week it vanishes. If you are still setting up your first property, start with how to start an Airbnb business.

Guest Favorites and Superhost are two different badges

This trips up almost every host I talk to. They are separate programs with separate rules.

Superhost is attached to you, the host account. Airbnb checks it quarterly against the trailing 12 months and publishes exact numbers: a 4.8 or higher overall rating, at least 10 reservations or 3 reservations totaling 100 or more nights, a 90% response rate to new messages within 24 hours, and a cancellation rate under 1% (What's required to be a Superhost, Airbnb Help Center).

Guest Favorites is attached to the listing. Airbnb states that each listing is treated individually when it decides eligibility, that evaluation runs automatically every day, and that the badge draws on ratings, reviews, and reliability data from more than half a billion trips. Roughly 2 million homes carry it, and travelers can filter search specifically for Guest Favorites.

So you can be a Superhost with three listings where only two carry the Guest Favorite badge. Airbnb says the Superhost program has not changed and is still checked quarterly, so one badge does not replace the other. The full criteria are in how to become an Airbnb Superhost.

What Airbnb says it actually measures

Airbnb names five inputs: at least five reviews from guests, excellent reviews, high marks for check-in, cleanliness, accuracy, host communication, location, and value, a superb record of reliability with host cancellations and quality-related customer service issues of 1% on average, and communications between guests and hosts on the platform.

That last input gets ignored and it should not be. Airbnb can only read the conversation it can see. Move a guest to WhatsApp and you hand the platform a stay with no visible communication attached. Keep the thread on Airbnb, including check-in instructions and the "how is everything going" message on night one.

About the 4.9-star figure you keep seeing

Airbnb's help article does not publish a numeric star cutoff for Guest Favorites. You will find a 4.9 threshold repeated across host forums, blogs, and YouTube, and it may well be directionally right, but it is not in Airbnb's own documentation. The words Airbnb uses are "excellent reviews" and "high marks."

Treat 4.9 as folklore, not a rule. The operational takeaway is the same either way: you need to sit near the top of the platform, not merely above average, and one 3-star stay on a listing with a dozen reviews does real damage. Do not build a strategy around a number Airbnb has never confirmed.

The six category ratings, and the lever that moves each

Five of the six are yours to control. Location is fixed the day you take the listing on.

Cleanliness produces more low scores than any other category and is the least forgiving. A guest will overlook a slow shower, not hair on the bathroom floor. Tighten your turnover process before anything else.

Check-in is usually lost to a detail. Confirm the code works the day before arrival and send directions with photos, not paragraphs. The options Airbnb supports are in this self check-in guide.

Host communication rewards speed over eloquence. Saved answers for the questions you get every booking (parking, Wi-Fi, arrival time, late checkout) let you reply in seconds, and message automation handles most of them for you.

Value is the one hosts misread as "be cheaper." It is the gap between what a guest paid and what they felt they got, so you move it from either side: the amenities you stock or how you price the stay.

Reliability is the fastest way to lose the badge

Ratings move slowly. Reliability moves in one afternoon.

Airbnb's stated reliability standard for Guest Favorites is host cancellations and quality-related customer service issues of 1% on average. That is a thin margin, and the arithmetic makes it obvious.

Illustrative math, assumed inputs: on a listing with 100 completed reservations in the window, a single host cancellation puts you at 1 in 100, exactly 1%. On a listing with 40 reservations, one cancellation is 2.5%, well past the average Airbnb names. A newer listing has almost no room for one mistake, and the same cancellation counts against the under-1% Superhost requirement, so one bad decision can cost both badges.

The cancellations I see are almost all preventable: double bookings from an unsynced calendar, accepting a date you knew was tight, a renovation that ran long, a cleaner who quit with no backup. Every one is a systems problem, not bad luck. Sync your calendars, keep a backup cleaner's number in your phone, and block dates before you commit to work on the property.

Quality-related customer service issues count too, so the guest who has to contact Airbnb about a broken heater costs you more than the repair. Fix problems in the message thread, fast, before the guest escalates.

What to do if you lose the Guest Favorites badge

Losing it is not a penalty box. Because Airbnb re-evaluates listings every day, the badge returns as soon as the underlying numbers do.

1. Read the last ten reviews, not the last one. One angry guest rarely removes a badge. A pattern does. Sort recent stays by category and find the score that is dragging. It is usually cleanliness or accuracy.

2. Fix the operational cause, not the review. If accuracy is slipping, your photos sell a version of the place that no longer exists. If cleanliness is slipping, your cleaner changed or your checklist is verbal instead of written. Never offer a guest anything in exchange for a rating, and do not pressure someone to change a review they already left.

3. Add clean stays, because the window is a rolling average. Illustrative math, assumed inputs: say your listing has 30 completed stays in the window and two ended in a customer service issue. That is 2 in 30, about 6.7%. Twenty clean stays later you are at 2 in 50, or 4%. Fifty clean stays later, 2 in 80, or 2.5%. The number only falls by adding good stays, which is why recovery is measured in bookings rather than days.

4. Keep the bookings coming while you recover. A quiet calendar is the slowest possible recovery, because you cannot dilute old stays without new ones. Search visibility and the badge feed each other, and the factors Airbnb publishes for ranking are in how the Airbnb algorithm works.

Earning Guest Favorites as a co-host

Because the badge sits on the listing rather than the host account, it is one of the strongest things a co-host can put in front of an owner. You are not promising better marketing. You are pointing at a badge Airbnb recalculates daily and saying you can get it on their listing.

Be honest about the split of control. As a co-host you own four of the six categories outright: check-in, cleanliness, host communication, and in practice most of accuracy. Location is fixed. Value depends on price, so get pricing authority written into the arrangement or accept that one of the six is outside your hands.

Settle cancellation authority in writing before your first booking. One owner-side cancellation, made without telling you, can undo months of clean stays. The same document should cover who talks to guests, because scattered communication across two accounts weakens the on-platform record Airbnb reads. If you are building this into a service, becoming an Airbnb co-host covers how the role and payout are structured.

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