“Verified WiFi” feature finally added by Airbnb & why it doesn’t yet work

It’s finally here. In their 2021 Winter Release, Airbnb has finally addressed the biggest issue facing Digital Nomads booking accommodation via Airbnb: lack of info when it comes to the WiFi speed.

Up until now, in order to work remotely from the accommodation that you book on Airbnb, you had to go through a quite tedious process. To find a half-decent WiFi, you had to reach out to a number of different hosts, ask them to take the Speed Test, and upload the picture of it to the listing. If you were unlucky they would have no idea of what you are talking about, how to take the test, or how to send it to you (they can’t send you a picture on Airbnb’s chat). This was always a worrying sign but it didn’t necessarily mean that the WiFi was crap, maybe they get someone to set it up for them and forgot about it 😉

Unfortunately, you had to repeat this process a number of times in order to finally get WiFi that is strong enough for what you need. It was painful and it seemed that we were doing Airbnb’s job for them. So seeing that the recent Winter updates finally include the Verified WiFi feature was almost an early Christmas Miracle!

Airbnb WiFi Speed

The Verified Wifi feature is added to the listing page, so you can see the exact speed and some info on what that means. It uses the M-Lab’s download speed checker, which tests the connection through the host’s mobile device. In order to help users to understand the speed results it uses the following to describe them: Fairly Slow, Solid WiFi, Snappy WiFi, Fast Wifi.

The speeds are as follow:

GNG Score Internet Speeds

The above, to us, sounds very conservative. My internet speeds dropped today to about 28 Mbps, I could not watch an online webinar, my Zoom calls dropped a few times and I have to watch online video streams in a lower quality. We don’t believe the M-Lab, speed ranges are quite what most Digital Nomads working remotely would actually need.

As part of the Global Nomad Score, we also analyze the WiFi speeds but we believe that in order to be able to work without issues or hiccups, most Digital Nomads and Remote Worker will need a stronger connection than those from M-Lab. We base our score using the Speedtest Global Index by Ookla. They use median which is a more representative measure of everyday experiences.

WiFi test

So how does it work? It is actually pretty cool! In order to add the WiFi speed to their listing, the host has to do the Speed Test but what is great about it is that there are a few things put in place to assure that the test is accurate. To do the test, hosts need to:

• be connected to the WiFi network, they can’t do through the Mobile Network;
• add apartment WiFi details that will be shared with with Guests during check in, which means it has to actually be the WiFi that you will really be using if you book the accommodation.

Here are a few screenshots of how does it look for Hosts:

So how is it? The process itself is pretty intuitive and most hosts should not have issues with running the test; however the Verified Wifi feature is absolutely optional, hosts can choose to add it or not to their listing. So far this means; only a fraction of listings have done the verification. This means that now, Guests need to keep telling Hosts to run the test if they want to know exactly what are the actual wifi speeds. Kind of back to square one 😉

To address this, Global Nomad Guide is launching a campaign to ask Airbnb to make the speeds test verification mandatory for anyone who ads the WiFi to their listing.

Please Sign the Petition to @Airbnb @bchesky to make the WiFi speed test mandatory for any Host that says WiFi is available

Airbnb Winter Release

For the full announcement and other details, please watch the Airbnb 2021 Winter Release below.

Last updated January 2, 2023.