Airbnb Will Now Verify Your Rental's Wi-Fi Speed Before You Book

It's happened to the best of us. You book what looks like an incredibly chic Airbnb, and, after a day of exploring, you settle in for a relaxing evening of Netflix... only to find that your rental's Wi-Fi is unbearably slow. Decided to work remotely during your stay? Well, let's just say your Zoom meetings will look a lot more like a series of freeze frames.

Airbnb has heard this anguish loud and clear. The homesharing platform announced this week that it will be rolling out a new feature called “Verified Wi-Fi,” which will allow renters to check the Wi-Fi speed in a property before booking. While hosts were previously able to test their own download speed and add it to their listing, all listed speeds will now be verified by Airbnb through its in-app speed test, ensuring that you book a property with a fast connection.

It's another step the platform has taken to accommodate the recent wave of remote workers who have been seeking out long-term rentals for a change of scenery. “One of the really big changes is, for millions of people, they've been untethered from where they have to work,” said Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky in a statement. “More and more people are working from Airbnbs, so they need really good Wi-Fi. We know this matters.”

According to Chesky, the platform's Wi-Fi search feature has been used over 288 million times in 2021 alone. And workcations don't seem to be going away anytime soon: From July to September of this year, 20 percent of stays booked on Airbnb were for one month or longer.

The Wi-Fi verification will roll out alongside a number of other upgrades, including a way to evaluate a property's accessibility features and a translation engine that will automatically translate Airbnb listings and reviews into more than 60 languages.