I’ve had several guests leave reviews in their native language. Those reviews are no longer visible on my listing. Very disappointing. I have so many guests from around the world that I liked those reviews. I thought it added a little extra information to the potential guest. For those who don’t speak that language they can cut and paste into Google Translate. I’m going to have to follow up on this.
The listing reviews are now out of chronological order, and instead are listed by what country the guest is from. If you go to your profile, those reviews are chronological.
This “feature” has been discussed here quite a bit, and the consensus is that we all hate this. Perhaps, for you, the good news is a potential guest in Germany will see the German reviews first.
Worth taking a look anyhow. I think that @EllenN has also had some reviews “disappear.”
My reviews are now listed almost randomly. Some of the most recent ones (in English) are on pages 9-10, and some reviews from 2014 are on page 3. It’s very irritating.
I did have some reviews from guests who weren’t American disappear. They have reappeared. Count me as one of the hosts who wishes the reviews would be in simple chronological order.
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hmmm…thanks for the info folks. I just took a look at my reviews and they don’t make a lot of sense as far as chronological order goes. Still can’t find the ones in foreign languages. I should use something like CyberGhost to mimic logging in from other countries to see what it looks like.
I had a Finnish guest write a review in Finnish. That was the first one and I thought it was pretty cool. Recently I’ve been asking guests to write in their native language. Now my most recent reviews are gone. They shouldn’t mess with the order of reviews.
I nought they were a global company???
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I really don’t understand why they are messing with this. Chronological ordering of reviews is the most logical way and what every other company does. As a guest, I want to see how things stand with the listing NOW, not have to read a bunch of reviews from 3 years ago.
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Don’t get me started on this!! It makes me so angry!!! I’ve had more foreigners than US Citizens in the last month or two. I have two very nice reviews from Canadians (we are only a 3-4 hr drive from the border so we get lots of Canadians), a great review from Australia, we just got one from Brazil, one from Germany, and a nice family from Argentina with a cute little toddler that loved watching the squirrels from our place. . So frustrating that their reviews are at the end. They are nicely written and all but one are in English. Unfortunately I just got a booking from Italy and one coming up soon from Switzerland. I enjoy hosting folks from other countries, but I’m starting to feel resentful because no one will see the reviews. When we started hosting I was worried we might get some bad guests and I would turn Instant Book off. I never dreamed I’d be thinking of turning it off so I could decline foreigners. Seems to go against what ABB claims to stand for. It couldn’t be that difficult for them to change the order. Whew, I feel better just bring able to vent here. By the way, I did complain about this on twitter and was told they would pass my comments along and value me as a host, but obviously it was just b.s.
I just tried using CyberGhost to change the location Airbnb thinks I live to another country. It doesn’t offer a lot of choices for country. So I could not select Brazil to see if my recent Brazilian guest’s review would show up. My thought was that if people in Brazil were looking at my listing they might be shown a review from that area. I thought perhaps they would geo target their message.
I might contact a couple of guests and have them search and see if their reviews come up. I don’t think they would be happy if they didn’t.
We recently had our glowing 5 star review placed on page 13 of our mostly positive reviews and the undeserved damming review from our previous guest left on the top. After much effort to speak with an employee, we were told that ordering is based on ethnic/country group. After pointing out this is inconsistent with their non discrimination policy we were told that reviews are order by what is considered by Airbnb to be most useful to guests! We were then told it is according to the first language listed by the guest as speaking, this seems the same as our previous concern re discrimination of ordering reviews based on first language spoken!- our recent guest was from India, having moved to Australia - he and his partner spoke and wrote their review in perfect English. How is this review less important than first English speaking reviews?
The customer service representative you spoke with gave you incorrect information. The reviews are being sorted in order of what country the guest puts in their profile that they live in. We recently had a guest who lives in San Diego, CA which is about a two hour drive from Los Angeles, CA. He is in the Navy. His review is buried because when he joined Airbnb he was stationed in Okinawa, Japan.
It amounts to the same thing as what you’re saying, though, in essence. Either way it’s crap and annoying.
I think you’re completely right, @LenaWay, that this is counter to the whole ethos that Airbnb promotes - belong anywhere, it doesn’t matter where you are from you are welcome etc etc. I am from the UK and I don’t place any more weight on British reviews that I do on anyone else’s (in fact probably the opposite because we’re mean moany buggers!). It’s very stupid.
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Truly hate the way they seem to let the reps say anything they want or make up untold lies to appease customers or flatter them.
Have experienced a number of howlers myself.
I’ve also had good customer service but only from those who seem to be a higher level employee than what you get from the call center.
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No, it doesn’t amount to the same thing. The reviews are in order by the country of origin, not the language they are written in. I have many guests write reviews in English. If their profiles state that they live in another country the reviews are buried. I don’t mind that the foreign language reviews are at the bottom.
I am in the minority but I like the reviews ordered by country, and that’s what other platforms like TripAdvisor do (when I look at restaurant reviews in Italy, I see French reviews first).
There is a cultural dimension and chances are that your fellow citizens will like/dislike the same things as you (you know, like kettles or duvets 
) . And for guests I think it’s reassuring to see that someone from their country stayed in a particular place, that they were welcome and enjoyed their stay.
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That was certainly our experience - 40 minutes on the phone with the kind Airbnb employee while she also seemed dumbfounded about the problem - she suggested having friends using other computers to see if they could see the review. It was later that she apparently found out about the review ordering according to the guest country profile, explaining this in an email. After pointing out that this was inconsistent with their nondiscrimination policy, her response changed to the ‘most helpful’ and then the ‘language’ explanation. She then tried to make a joke about the problem, when this was not well received by us, she then told us she had clear instructions that she should “not escalate” our issue.
Yes, reviews seem to be assigned first by the country of the guest (the registered one), then by its language and then all the rest. The problem with this order if that you are taking out accuracy out reviews. The chronological order is the only one that will show you the current status of that particular listing.
A review left 4 years ago from a guy living in your country isn’t more relevant than a review left last month for someone that speaks a language different that yours, especially if you understand that language too. Look my case, my native language is Spanish but I can understand pretty well any sort of review left in English or Portuguese and in most cases, I will have to scroll through a lot of pages to find the more recent review left for that listing. I believe this is the case for many us which are mostly bilingual or at least can understand fairly well another language.
The right thing to do this is to let the guest chose. Show them in chronological order by default and let the user sort the reviews by his country or language. For me, this is bothersome as a host and as a guest.
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I think that’s a good solution. Maybe they’ll get to it.
I do think chronological shows what the current status is of guest satisfaction and may also tell a better story of how guest satisfaction changes or evolves for that host. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m not always at my best.
The person browsing Airbnb listings may not be logged into their account which means they can’t pull account data such as country or language. But they can get the IP address of the connecting browser and then find the country for that IP. I would like to see what they deliver for reviews in this case versus what they deliver if the user is logged in. I’m sure the browser stores pages locally in cache so it might not be easy to test. You’d get the same page whether logged in or not.
I sometimes think that Airbnb over thinks things.
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It’s not less important, and furthermore, it’s so easy to translate these days I don’t want the non English reviews buried either. So ridiculous!!!
This is exactly what they should do!!! Let the guest choose!
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