Same city, different page one: What Airbnb shows guests from each country
A guest in London and a guest in Berlin who search Airbnb for the same city, the same weekend and the same party do not see the same first page. We knew the order changes by country; that is what tauRank measures. This time we looked at something more concrete: the prices on that first page. How far apart are they, and why?
Over a month of daily searches in five Romanian cities, the average nightly price on page one differed by 16% between the cheapest and the dearest country on a typical day. In Bucharest, searchers in the United Kingdom were shown the dearer page on 27 days out of 28.
This piece is about Airbnb only. On Booking.com the same properties appear for every country, so there is no gap of this kind to measure.
What we measured
tauRank runs the same Airbnb search every day from several countries, through an ordinary residential connection in each one. For this piece we took the first 24 results of each search, which is Airbnb's first page, and averaged the nightly price, converted to euros at the European Central Bank's rate for the day. The methodology sets out the search itself.
Each country's page one is compared with the same search, run on the same day, from the other countries: same city, same party, same stay. The data runs from 14 September to 15 October 2026: 1,767 first pages across Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Iași and Brașov. Searches whose page came back in an unexpected currency were left out.
The gap, city by city
For two guests and a weekend, averaged over the month:
- Bucharest has the widest steady gap. The UK's page one averaged €67 a night and Germany's €56, a difference of €11, or 20%.
- Cluj-Napoca follows the same pattern at a smaller scale: the UK €56, Germany and Romania €50.
- Iași is the closest of the five, with €3 between Germany and the UK.
- Timișoara is the only city we read from ten countries. Romania was shown the cheapest page (€48). Australia was shown the dearest (€59), but from only 20 days of searches.
- Brașov is the odd one. Over the month Romania's page one was the dearest, by €6, but which country gets the dearer page changes from day to day. On any given day the three countries were 38% apart, about €22 a night. Those daily gaps mostly cancel out over a month.
It is not one bad day
A single search moves around, so a gap this size could be noise. It is not. In Bucharest the UK's page one sat above the average of the countries searched that day on 27 of 28 days. In Cluj-Napoca it was above on 81% of days, and in Iași on 77%. The gaps in the line are days on which a search from that country did not complete.
Across every city, party size and stay length we read, the countries rank the same way on average:
| Searcher's country | Page one, against the same search from other countries |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 3.9% dearer |
| United States | 3.7% dearer |
| Romania | 1.0% cheaper |
| Germany | 1.8% cheaper |
| Italy | 3.1% cheaper |
| Croatia | 3.7% cheaper |
The UK figure is the firmest, read from 338 first pages and good to within about a percentage point. Italy and the United States were read on fewer days, and their figures are less certain. Austria, Spain, France and Australia were read too rarely, or vary too much, to tell apart from zero.
Same listing, same price. Different listings.
A listing on Airbnb is quoted the same nightly price whichever country is searching; we checked that across tens of thousands of listings and found no difference in the typical case. So the gap is not a surcharge. It comes from which listings each country is shown.
On days when Romania, Germany and the United Kingdom all searched, only part of page one was common to all three. In Iași it was nearly two thirds. In Brașov it was under a quarter: almost half of what a searcher in each country saw on page one, the other two did not see there at all.
The listings shown to only one country were, on average, 8.5% dearer than the ones every country saw (€69 against €63 a night). That is where most of the gap comes from: each country's page one carries its own handful of listings, and in Bucharest and Cluj the UK's handful tends to be the more expensive one.
We can say what each country was shown. We cannot say why. Airbnb does not publish how it ranks results, and a country-level pattern could come from many signals.
What this means for a host
- Page one is not one page. Between a seventh and a half of what a guest sees on page one is shown to their country alone, depending on the city. A listing on page one for a guest from Bucharest can be absent from it for a guest from London, and the reverse.
- Your price looks different from each country. A €60 listing in Bucharest is above the average of the German page one and below the average of the British one. Whether it reads as good value depends on whose page it is on.
- Look from your guests' countries, not from your own. A host checking their listing from home sees the home page only. That is the gap tauRank exists to show: position per country, every day, and the city reports for the market as a whole.
Caveats
These are averages of the first 24 results, read once a day from one connection per country, and Airbnb's order moves between identical searches. That is why we report over a month and show the day-by-day line for Bucharest. The data covers five Romanian cities and one month. Countries we read on fewer days carry wider uncertainty, and we have said where. As with everything on tauRank, no figure is modelled: each one was read from a search we ran, and no listing is named.