Airbnb removes guest reviews in foreign languages

We are actually thinking of mentioning in our listing that the foreign reviews are at the end. Not those exact words, but something conveying that the reviews are not in chronological order.

But…if someone is browsing the listings from say Italy and you have reviews in Italian those may come up first. It might be that Airbnb is micro-targeting consumers based on your listing content and where the visitor is browsing from. If the person is logged into their Airbnb account they would know the personal data and if not they can obtain the country by the IP address.

Yes, we wouldn’t actually use those words, we would say they’re not in chronological order.

What everyone seems to be missing here is that the reviews are being sorted by country even if they are written in the same language. My reviews are sorted by:

Americans (Actually people with profile stating that they are American.)
Guests with profiles stating that they are from other countries who wrote the reviews in English.
Reviews written in other languages.

I don’t mind the foreign language reviews being grouped together. I would vastly prefer that all of the reviews that are written in English be shown in chronological order.

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There is something about the country sort that doesn’t make me feel comfortable with. I can understand, though I don’t agree, that the company thinks it is better to show first reviews written in the same user’s language, but in regards to the country, they are making a kind of steryotype sort.

I don’t see how different is to show reviews grouped by country of residence than by skin color or by age. Yes, the second one sounds more offensive but if I were Chinese, is the company thinking that all Chinese people think the same way and I will weight their reviews more than someone living, say, in Canada. Isn’t a bit discriminatory?

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The reviews are not being grouped by country. The grouping is as follows.

  1. Guests who’s profile states that they live in the same country as the host and the review is written in the dominant language of the country.

  2. Guests who’s profile states that they live in a different country as the host, but are written in the dominant language of the host’s country. For example I have these reviews from guests who’s profile indicates that they live in the following countries in a row (all written in English): Great Britain, Turkey, Japan, Germany, France. They are not grouped by county. They are in chronological order.

  3. Reviews written in other languages. These are not grouped by language. They are grouped in chronological order.

I assume that nobody here wants to scroll through my reviews, but just in case here is a link to my listing.

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I don’t like it either and, as said already, think it is a peculiar way to view people’s attitudes. I get what @Barthelemy said about guests feeling reassured that their nationality is welcome in a place (cough Chinese cough). But to assume that people from a certain country or culture all think the same is just plain stupid.

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In my case, reviews are sorted in relation to the user’s location and the site’s language, and I have 4 categories in total. By “user”, I mean the one who is browsing your listing (not your guest still) and by “site’s language”, I mean the one you can customize to the one of your preference within the Airbnb site which I believe is assigned by default to the browser’s language.

Therefore my sort is listed as …

  1. Reviews from guests who’s registered country is the same as the user’s country (based on his IP location) AND are written in the dominant language of the country
  2. Reviews from guests that are written in the same language as the site’s language
  3. Reviews from guests who’s registered country is the same as the user´s country AND NOT written in the site’s language
  4. All the rest in chronological order.

It´s necessary to add that, in my case, step 1 only happens if there is a match between the selected language and the country´s dominant language of the user’s location. If this doesn’t happen then it jumps to step 2, skips 3 and then list 4. So, in this sense, you can control the sort by changing the site’s language.

Well either way it completely sucks!!! I don’t want those reviews at the end!!!

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But no guest will know to do that. They will just scroll through the first 5-15 reviews probably, and never get anywhere near the others because they have no idea there are current reviews at the end!!

Supposedly, if someone looks at your listing all the reviews from their country will show first. I think this is kooky on Airbnb’s part as many of my guests don’t live in the same country as is stated in their profile.

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I was first appalled when I discovered they’d done this.
I’d’ve at least preferred them to offer an option to switch between ‘Show my country/language’s reviews first’ and ‘Show latest reviews first’, with the former being the default.

I’m slowly getting used to this segregated system.

One consequence of this would be that regionally biased booking patterns could get self-reinforcing - you get some good reviews from folk of a particular country, more folk from there will book. Others might statistically be less likely in the same way.
I’m not sure this is entirely a good thing.

Can you explain a bit more what you mean by this?
I’m thinking that they’re trying to attract people who are a bit nervous about using the platform - new users see that someone from their “own country” liked it ok and therefore it’s “safe”. I don’t like that concept. Thanks Air but I don’t want nervous narrow-minded guests who only trust the opinion of their compatriots.
Many of us, guest and hosts alike, speak more than one language and have travelled a lot so we’re familiar with other cultures. We don’t need this segregated system, as you so aptly put it!

On the other hand, most of my worst reviews come from my fellow Brits so if it puts them off from booking - great!!

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How many times on this forum have we had hosts who don’t like to host guests from certain countries because they don’t like features of the culture? I can understand that guests might like to see that others from their culture felt welcome, but I don’t think this mish mosh of review order helps with that. It was fine with me when reviews in other languages were lumped together at the bottom. Now, Airbnb is assuming that guests are from the place stated in their profile. I’ve had many Chinese guests who’s profiles indicated that they were from the U.S. because they were attending college here. I had a guest from Paris who’s profile said he was from Barcelona because he really liked Barcelona. I recently had a guest who is in the Navy. He is American and lives here. His profile indicats that he is from Japan because he was stationed there when he opened his Airbnb account.

This is a rough theory in my head, not rigorously tested.

Imagine your last 2 reviews were from guests from country A and country B.
G-A left a glowing review, G-B’s was so-so.

Prospective guests in A are now more likely to book you. Even if folk in B book, maybe the so-so-ness will carry on in their reviews - sometimes the ‘tone’ of the reviews seem infectious to some extent. So A country guests statistically build up a more positive image while B country guests don’t.
Of course, there’s a good chance of a whole bunch of exceptions to this, so what I’m describing is a bit simplistic. But I think in aggregate something like this could happen, at least to some extent, over the course of many stays/reviews.

We’d probably need to feed all current airbnb booking and review data to IBM Watson to test this theory :slight_smile:

This is part of what I was saying. Btw, I get reasonably good reviews from fellow Brits - which is great too!!


I don’t think this is necessarily a reflection of the guests. They did not choose to only see the last 12 compatriot reviews, Airbnb gave it to them. If you’ve had a dozen reviews from a particular country, someone from that country will have to scroll 2-3 pages to ‘open-mindedly’ see other-country reviews.


All in all, Airbnb appears to be facilitating the formation of echo chambers a bit like what’s been seen on social media, where you’re only exposed to others who think like you.
Perhaps antithetical to the vision of a company that (cl)aims to be global and treat everyone the same irrespective of regional/national factors.

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That is an excellent and very interesting theoretical analysis (!), thanks @Astaire. Airbnb have some super qualified statisticians working for them and
they can play to their heart’s content with all the rich data that Air has amassed and continues to amass. Free-range statisticians, imagine!! Add to that an army of millennial programmers who all aspire to be innovative and are granted unlimited access to the platform playground. None of them have ever been a host or even a guest so they have no idea whatsoever about the actual product on which they work. This is what it was like a few years ago. They’ve upped their game considerably since then. I’ve enjoyed watching them grow but can’t help feeling I’m just staring at a bunch of algorithms now.
/George Orwell was right

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I hope you’re not mocking me there. Still, I’ve left my fair share of disclaimers :slight_smile:

Eggheads?

Like that story of those women in a sweatshop in a poor Asian country sewing/weaving silk garments who’ve never worn or can imagine wearing a silk outfit in their life? Or the limousine driver who’d never get to sit on the other side of the curtain?

No mocking intended at all, it was only a lighthearted joke! Fair point about the overall disconnect between workers and business-owners. And yet… mmhh… can’t quite equate 20 year-old Josh -who can can crash back to Mom’s sofa/basement when his great career at Airbnb goes tits up- with a child sweat-shop worker. But this is not the forum for such debate.
What kind of towels do you use? :wink:

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Alrightie! :grin:

I’m in fact talking about the disconnect between workers and the products they build/services they provide. Nothing about business or capital owners. I should think Airbnb programmers and customer support staff not having used Airbnb falls into that category.

Hmm…

I also think there is a disconnection between the products they released and the market they are intended to be made for.

At some point, the company will need to rethink their very core values and what role they play in the game. They are the middle man that helps build the bridge between guests and hosts. The user is the guest, the product is the host’s accomodation. and they are the marketplace. Host and Airbnb are kind of partners in this game, so please if hosts are telling you that non-chronological order of reviews doesn’t help, please hear your partners a little bit more and roll back that change.

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