Superhost sits on your account. It covers everything you run, and co-hosts cannot earn it at all. Guest Favorite sits on a single listing.

That difference matters more than it sounds. A property that is struggling costs that one listing its Guest Favorite badge and nothing more. The same property can pull your Superhost status down across your whole portfolio, including the listings that are doing perfectly well.

Airbnb checks Superhost four times a year, on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October. Each check looks back over the previous 12 months.

Because the window is 12 months and the check is quarterly, a bad run stays with you for a long time. A cancellation in March is still being counted the following February.

Guest Favorite works differently. It is recalculated every day, so it can appear and disappear without warning.

To be eligible at all, a listing needs at least 5 reviews in the past 4 years, and at least one of those in the past 2 years. After that, Airbnb looks at:

Airbnb has not published a star threshold for Guest Favorite. The 4.9 figure that circulates in host groups is someone's estimate, not an official number. Treat it as a rumour, because that is what it is.

This is the part worth understanding properly. A guest can filter an entire market down to Guest Favorite listings with one click. There is no equivalent filter for Superhost.

So the two badges do not sit at the same level in a guest's search. One of them changes which listings a guest sees at all. The other is something they notice once they are already looking at your page.

There is more going on than the two badges.

Airbnb gives gold trophies to top-performing listings, marked as top 1%, top 5% and top 10%. At the other end, a bottom 10% label can appear above the reviews on a listing, and it shows up on listings Airbnb has already contacted about quality. If you have had one of those messages, this is where it becomes visible to guests.

Strip away the names and the two badges are looking at the same four things: your ratings, what guests write about the stay, whether the place matches what you promised, and how often you cancel.

That is useful, because it means you are not managing two separate problems. Fixing the thing that is dragging one badge down is usually the same work that protects the other.

The full article, with the criteria laid out side by side, is on our blog: Guest favorite vs Superhost: what each one actually measures.

Both badges lean on the same thing: your rating, and what guests actually write about the stay. Rating Rescue reads your review history, works out which reviews have a case for removal under Airbnb's own policy, and gives you a fix list ranked by what will change the next guest's experience. Airbnb decides removals, not us. What we bring is knowing which cases hold up.

And if a listing of yours lost its Guest Favorite badge and you cannot work out which category slipped, post it in the RGA Insiders channel and we will look at it with you.

- Joana & Tony