Yes. I'm in charge of booking a ski trip for ~15 friends each year, and the amount of reading between the lines I have to do to make sure everyone has a comfortable place to sleep is crazy.
Tons of places count sofas/pullouts/day beds in the "Sleeps # of People", and they often count the temporary beds as space for 2. So you'll see places that say, Sleeps 16, but there are only 3 or 4 real beds.
What ridiculous is when you try searching for 'whole homes' and you end up getting 'apartments' which are nothing more than someones basement. Airbnb seems to encourage this too by letting people put whatever tags they want. It's kind of a joke. In addition, hiding the address makes it hard to double check on google street view.
Edit: My workaround is selecting super hosts only, 3-4 bedrooms, 1+ bathroom. Seems to filter out most of the apartments and "Houses" aka granny flats.
I rarely book for more than two people, but when I have I found that filtering on "2+ bathrooms" very quickly gets me the flats that really have several bedrooms.
I have even seen this on Zillow recently. Searching for rentals, choose type as House, and then it's the upper floor department in a house and the listing reads "you will be sharing the top floor with me".
I get that they want to hide the address to total strangers, but I'm sure it would be easy for Airbnb themselves to pull up the google streetview and have it as a static image on the listing.
Now you'd need to add some AI in to blur house numbers and $identifying_features - Street View's own AI knows to blur signs but leave house numbers intact (I only just realized this) so you can positively ID somewhere you're looking for.
I suggest reading "whole home" to mean "whole space". In fact, that's basically what I see on Airbnb now - "Entire place". Personally, I have no issue when that turns out to be a separate apartment in a larger house, as long as I'm not sharing the entrance/exit and living space with others.
This isn't foolproof either, though. I booked a hotel for 2 people in Chicago for an anniversary trip. We arrived to find the hotel had 4 very narrow and short bunkbeds. I checked the booking and it makes no mention of this.
The only reason we think of a hotel booking as being up front is that there is a standard observed across the industry: either 1 king or 2 queens. There's no similar standard for AirBnBs.
Tons of places count sofas/pullouts/day beds in the "Sleeps # of People", and they often count the temporary beds as space for 2. So you'll see places that say, Sleeps 16, but there are only 3 or 4 real beds.
Hotels have it right up front: 2 Queens. Period.