Guest Points Calculation Algorithm

English Forum Community 🗳️ Suggestions box
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The algorithm for calculating the number of Guest Points for a home is, in my opinion, unreasonable, unfair, and inadequate; and is long overdue for a major update and improvement.

We are believers in the concept of hosting members, getting credits for being a host, and using those credits to stay at the homes of other members who accept “hosting credits”. We have participated in dozens of traditional reciprocal exchanges and even more guest points exchanges. We understand and respect those members who only participate in reciprocal exchanges on principle, and also the smaller number of members who only participate in guest points exchanges.

However, the Guest Points algorithm seems inadequate and unfair. To avoid writing a long essay by going into great detail, here are the major problems:

The points allocated for “location” (i.e. closeness to a “tourist” site) are totally arbitrary and dependent on a member’s own personal opinion of a “tourist site”. It is not based on any objective ranking of the tourist sites of the world at an international, country, or regional level. Therefore, a member may significantly inflate or deflate the guest points value of their home by over 100 points by manipulating this attribute of their home.

The “sleeping capacity” points of a home are calculated only by the number of beds in a home, not the number of bedrooms or bathrooms. So, for example, if I have a home with only 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom, and 3 double-beds in that single bedroom; I get the same number of points for “sleeping capacity” as a home with 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and 3 double beds! This doesn’t make sense. Surely it is better for couples in a group to have the privacy and space of separate bedrooms and even better, separate bathrooms, and more points should be awarded for extra bedrooms and bathrooms?

And finally, the “amenity” value of a home seems to have a limit so that a home with many more amenities than another might have the same GP calculation for amenties. Also, there are many other issues with the Amenity calculation like duplication of similar things (TV and Smart TV, car and EV, etc). Also, who has assigned the individual value of each amenity type? Many seem to be over-valued or under-valued.

If all this is too complicated to analyze and fix, perhaps it would be better to do a simpler system in which guest points are simply the number of nights which a member has hosted compared to the number where they have been guests. For example, if I have hosted for 14 nights but guested for 10 nights, then I have a “bank” of 4 nights which can be used to stay with a host who accepts me.

In any case, I suggest that the GP algorithm is due for a review and a prioritized list of enhancements. Perhaps the Home Exchange Development team would consider organizing a session or sessions to get input from members? The forum is a wonderful addition to the community, but for deep dives into requirements gathering, I suggest that it requires a more focused effort.

I am retired now, but in my working career I was a software developer, systems analyst and designer, a business analyst, a software development manager, and a project manager (LOL not all at the same time!).

I would be very happy to participate in any sessions or project to review the existing algorithms.

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Hello (again) and thank you for the feedback.
I understand your opinion, but I would come back on a few parts.

I quote you :

"The points allocated for “location” (i.e. closeness to a “tourist” site) are totally arbitrary and dependent on a member’s own personal opinion of a “tourist site”. It is not based on any objective ranking of the tourist sites of the world at an international, country, or regional level. "

No in fact, there’s a quotation explained when members registered and it’s also in the FAQ. See : “https://help.homeexchange.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000613078-How-do-I-complete-and-edit-my-listing-to-100” . Members should check online to see how many visitors are in their area generally.

“The “sleeping capacity” points of a home are calculated only by the number of beds in a home, not the number of bedrooms or bathrooms. So, for example, if I have a home with only 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom, and 3 double-beds in that single bedroom; I get the same number of points for “sleeping capacity” as a home with 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and 3 double beds! This doesn’t make sense. Surely it is better for couples in a group to have the privacy and space of separate bedrooms and even better, separate bathrooms, and more points should be awarded for extra bedrooms and bathrooms?”

As I already answered in an another thread, the staff is already working on it, to avoid including put-up beds etc in the calculation, and to make situations like you describe better. It should be done within a few months.

“And finally, the “amenity” value of a home seems to have a limit so that a home with many more amenities than another might have the same GP calculation for amenties. Also, there are many other issues with the Amenity calculation like duplication of similar things (TV and Smart TV, car and EV, etc). Also, who has assigned the individual value of each amenity type? Many seem to be over-valued or under-valued.”

Each item doesn’t have a “value”, it’s an algorithm which takes a combination of items to make the calculation. It’s different for everyone, it’s not just “+” or " -", it depends on other factors (I don’t have details on that, don’t ask me, I just know this :slight_smile: ).

“If all this is too complicated to analyze and fix, perhaps it would be better to do a simpler system in which guest points are simply the number of nights which a member has hosted compared to the number where they have been guests. For example, if I have hosted for 14 nights but guested for 10 nights, then I have a “bank” of 4 nights which can be used to stay with a host who accepts me.”

It’s a nice exchanging opinion of course, but changing the model would make a big risk for the company, and for its financial results. Why would they do that while the site is successful and getting better and bigger every day, causing too much risk for the business model. I won’t see any reason to do that. Of course the gp algorithm could be better, but changing it completely doesn’t make any sense in the company situation in my humble opinion !

I don’t think it’s the staff projects to work on that, but who knows :slight_smile:

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It is not a perfect valuation, indeed, there is some room for improvement. Not sure a complete overhaul is the highest priority, perhaps incremental improvements?.. I am also mindful of the fact that, given the variety of members, of homes and of situations, no system will ever please everyone. Still, we should all aim for fairness.
One feature which I feel is not given sufficient value is a free inner city garage parking in major urban centres. For homes in suburbs or country settings, parking is simple, however, free safe parking in a city is a luxury (so the car be left there, safe, for the duration of one’s stay).

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No in fact, there’s a quotation explained when members registered and it’s also in the FAQ. See : “https://help.homeexchange.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000613078-How-do-I-complete-and-edit-my-listing-to-100” . Members should check online to see how many visitors are in their area generally.

There are two problems with the way “location” works in the calculation…

  1. The designations (International site is “several dozens of millions of visitors”, national site is “hundreds of thousands of visitors”, etc; IS totally arbitrary. Did the HE team use some internationally recognized tourism association to define these cutoff numbers, what logic was used to define them? How did the team decide that “less than 30 minutes away” is the cutoff? For example, “several dozens of millions” implies 36 million or more visitors. “hundreds of thousands” implies 100,000 to 1 million. Therefore, what is a site that is more than 1 million and less than 36 million? It is unclear based on the HE Team definition.
  2. Also, since the member can choose any location designation they wish, there is no control over a member choosing a very inaccurate location designation. In my opinion, HE should investigate whether there are tourism GIS databases available, and use them to automatically calculate the location value of a member’s home.

As I already answered in an another thread, the staff is already working on it, to avoid including put-up beds etc in the calculation, and to make situations like you describe better. It should be done within a few months.

It’s nice to know that the HE Team is “working on it”. But I have been a home exchange member for over 10 years and I have not heard about this. Why has there been no communication to the wide membership about this upcoming major change? Why wasn’t there a focused serious effort to gather requirements information from the membership about such a major improvement? What are the changes that are being made? For significant changes, I believe there should be more communication coming from the HE Team to the members.

Each item doesn’t have a “value”, it’s an algorithm which takes a combination of items to make the calculation. It’s different for everyone, it’s not just “+” or " -", it depends on other factors (I don’t have details on that, don’t ask me, I just know this :slight_smile: ).

Yes, you have told me this many times. Thank You. I am well aware of it. Why do you find it necessary to repeat this multiple times? This is the SUGGESTIONS category of the forum. I am offering suggestions for CHANGING and IMPROVING how it currently works.
Are any HE Software team members looking at this forum? If so, I hope they read the suggestions and take them seriously. On the other hand, if they are relying on a small team of elite Ambassadors and Moderators to advise them, then I hope you are taking the suggestions seriously and not simply saying “this is how the platform works, we can’t change it because it might affect the business model”.

It’s a nice exchanging opinion of course, but changing the model would make a big risk for the company, and for its financial results. Why would they do that while the site is successful and getting better and bigger every day, causing too much risk for the business model. I won’t see any reason to do that. Of course the gp algorithm could be better, but changing it completely doesn’t make any sense in the company situation in my humble opinion !

I don’t think it’s the staff projects to work on that, but who knows :slight_smile:

It’s clear that you do not have a background in an IT company or department. All IT apps and platforms need to constantly improve, both fixing flaws and improving the user experience, or they will die or be beaten by a company with a better product. The reason I joined HE was because it was the best in its field 10 years ago. I had previously used another platform. The future success of a company is not based soley on current financial results. If the current and future happiness of the customers (i.e. Members) is not satisfied by ongoing improvements, then the platform will eventually lose customers (members) and will fail.

You yourself said in another topic that over 80% of current exchanges are GP exchanges. If so, don’t you think it’s important to constantly improve the ease-of-use, fairness, and flexibility of the GP calculation algorithms?

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sorry I’m in exchange abroad right now and don’t have time to answer all of this. But don’t worry someone from the staff will read the forum and forward suggestions. They don’t rely only on this forum which is quite new, feedback is provided daily from the Facebook groups, livetchat, member support etc for years.

Happy new year with some advance .

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Happy New Year to you too, Etienne.

The purpose of my posts in the Suggestions Box category is not to debate with you or other volunteer Ambassadors or Moderators, or to seek help in using the platform. My intention is to offer suggestions to the Home Exchange staff so that, hopefully, they will be aware of challenges and problems with the current platform, algorithms, and functions; and consider implementing improvements to the system.

In my opinion, this is the purpose of this forum category, based on the pinned message at the top of the category.

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I actually think the precision of the definition of distance from a location is not really intuitive. I put us in the category of close to a local site because that is how I think of it whereas when I looked it up we get 12 million visitors a year which would make us an international site by your definition. I don’t know if you can somehow use the address for that point contribution.

The other one is that beds and bedrooms should be part of the calculation. Maybe as simple as number it sleeps over actual bedrooms vs the number it sleeps. (and give the cribs/toddler beds less points).

I also struggle with the problem of summer vs winter desirability so points are some basic average I guess?

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Even this feature can be challenged: I would never drive to cities in Europe because they have excellent public transport systems and/or you can take a bike to get around. In your example, I would have to ‘pay’ more to GPs for a covered parking space that I would not use. Furthermore, HE is a B Corp, so they should not value parking spaces more. They should value nearby public transport and solar panels more… Let’s say we disagree on this…

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I am not sure we really disagree :wink:
Please note though, I am not in Europe. As you may know, North America is designed for cars, unfortunately. That being said, we encourage our guests not to plan to use a car in downtown Montreal, and very few ever have ; many did not even use the metro, given all is walkable from our location. Still, some guests are on a road trip involving QuĂŠbec city, Montreal, Ottawa, etc. and have a car for their arrival, and for their departure; many are cross-border tourists who drive here from the USA. Did you know the train ride from New York to Montreal is just under 12 hours, but it is an 8-hour drive (this is not Europe!!) and Boston is not much better. Our indoor underground garage is also very handy for safe keeping of bikes and expensive Bromptons ;-), so it can be very B Corp. Over the last 10 years, Montreal has made great progress in reducing car lanes, covering the city with bike lanes and all but eliminating on-street parking, except for residents with permits (hence the importance of a private indoor parking space for non residents). Anyway, my point here is that context matters, and what may be common in Europe cannot be assumed to be the same elsewhere. We must all adjust our expectations (and valuations) to local conditions.
My earlier point was not that my home should be evaluated higher because of a garage, I am quite content with our GP evaluation. It was just an example to illustrate that I find that HE valuations do not take urban or rural contexts into account, and in some cases apples and oranges are given the same value. All of the attributes that affect evaluation are treated the same, regardless of being inner city, or in a rural area. For many items (bed, stove, fridge, AC), this is fine. However, for some amenities, the reality of what is a real premium and what can be taken for granted can be very different depending on an inner-city or a rural setting. The parking was just an example of this. Another example is the important amount of points a yard or small garden will give to a home, regardless of the season. For a country house, this is a bit exaggerated, of course there is some green space, it is in the middle of the countryside! As a tourist, I often won’t use it, I am out and about visiting, just as you would not use a parking. Even the number of square metres/feet, given cost, cannot really be assessed the same, or, at the very least, guests’ expectations of space should not be the same for inner-city or for rural settings, not for the same GP value. There is no easy solution, but it makes some valuations seem odd, both in terms of the location’s desirability and of a reality check. Lets face it, some very nice centrally-located appartments in Paris are worth much much less in GP (say 150 GP) than some naturally larger homes in the middle of frankly NOWHERE in an obscure countryside of France (200 to 250 GP), and I don’t mean ocean front, where you DO have the extra cost of needing a rental car!!! You are right, maybe the focus should not be on cars/parking, but more on public transit, this should give urban homes a more important differential and not inflate the values of very remote (large) homes.
In closing, our own country house under HE is valued much higher than our urban condo, and yet, there is much more demand for the condo and, in real estate terms, it is worth double the value of the country house. I realize HE valuations are not based on market value, they are ‘usability’ but still, certain basic principles should logically be more in sync, like the principles of rarity and demand. These should not be the only drivers of course, as HE is not a market-based activity, but occasionally HE values are really out in left field !!

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Maybe we don’t really disagree… The problem is that everyone thinks that their own preferences count for others (or… are more important). And yes, some amenities should be looked at from a geographical point of view. But without making the system so complicated, it could already be improved.

And I responded to your comment because I am very frustrated that one of the amenities with a high value (29 points) is air conditioning, which is a very American feature (of course, airco is also valued elsewhere). But in many areas, air conditioning is not needed at all. Also because HE always says that the points are the result of the algorithm, but if you only have air conditioning as a unique amenity, you get 29 points.

And I am also frustrated that size does not matter (and you are right: this should also be related to location…). while beds do. I don’t needs beds or lots of rooms but I do appriciate space…