Hi dear hosts,
Over the last month, three 5-star reviews from guests have failed to show on my listing.
They are obviously in the system, as airbnb has set me emails showing what the guests wrote. They were all in English, and none has appeared on my page.
I’ve called the helpline, several times. and received notification these errors have been reported, and are boing investigated.
Today I noticed yet 5-star review is missing.
Called again and was assured they are "looking into it."
Has anyone else experienced this?
If so, was it ever resolved?
Thank you so much.
I’ve been having the same problem. @Alia_Gee posted that it’s guests who live outside of the U.S. She was correct. I called Airbnb. It took forever to prove that I was correct; reviews that should be showing aren’t. Once the customer service representative decided I was credible she said that she would write a ticket for the technical team.
Thanks Ellen.
Experience tells me that " writing a ticket for the technical team" hasn’t solved the problem. It continues.
I’m in Canada. My guests were form the US.
I hear you on the writing a ticket issue. It seems to be a meaningless phrase meant to placate the caller. The customer service representative pointed out to me that all of the reviews are showing under the host profile. I told her that guests look at the listing, not at the host profile.
It sounds like listings are only showing the reviews from the country in which the listing is located.
Emails urge me to leave guest reviews, even for two groups who cancelled their bookings. That’s a tad irksome when reviews they’ve written for me don’t appear on my listing.
As for the technical team, well, I’ve never heard from the technical team on any issue supposedly reported to them, no reported problem has been resolved and we can’t contact them.
Yes. Ellen, I believe you’ve explained it well – telling us our problem has been referred to the team is supposed to placate us. It worked, for me, the first time I heard it, some three years ago. Now, it escalates my frustration and I spend far too much time in a fruitless effort to come up with a potent reply.
Any suggestions? Other than explaining to the representative that the entire technical team, comprising one person, left for a trek in Outer Mongolia and doesn’t plan to return. The job was too unrewarding as there was never acknowledgment or gratitude from a host as no glitch in the system had ever been reported.
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For a company that talks about inclusiveness, etc, segregating by nationality and not posting foreign reviews at all seems wrong. Should we try tweeting about this?
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Hello Arlene,
I’ve read from the wise, experienced hosts on this forum that tweeting is more likely to receive attention from the staff
yet
I don’t know how to tweet!
I can’t understand what reason the site staff would have to exclude reviews from guests travelling from a country different from that of the host, if that is indeed what they’re doing.
What could be their reasoning?
On my listing, reviews from people who live in (or at least made their airbnb account in) the US are showing up first. The rest of the reviews are bunched up together after my last USian guest in 2014.
From this, I’m extrapolating (cough Wild Assed Guessing cough) that the algorithm is matching reviews to country of origin of the person looking at the listing. *
So if I was looking at Airbnb’s in Vietnam, reviews from other Americans would pop up at the top, not whatever the most recent review was.
I’m guessing this is another guest-centric move, and it’s clever, but it would have been nice to get some warning.
- this doesn’t explain the US/Canada thing, unless the guests made their account in Canada, or Airbnb forgot Canada is a different country. USians do that sometimes.
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Yes but it seems that depending on how you’re viewing, sometimes the reviews don’t show up at all.
I have now asked a customer service rep via the Airbnb help on twitter. I’ve been going back and forth about my other issues/questions about the changes in what I’m able to do as a cohost (with no resolution, just says they’ll escalate it). I’ve just now added my question about this since I have someone “listening”. I’ll let you know what they say.
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This is Air’s response on twitter: “When someone views your listing, reviews written in their language or by people from their country are shown first. The other reviews are still visible, but they’ll be listed higher or lower on depending on the language and country of the viewer.” We hope that answers your question but feel free to reply with any additional questions you may have. Thank you
To which I replied: Thanks but can you pass along to your superiors that a lot of people are upset about this. I participate in a large international air-hosts forum as well as a Facebook page for Seattle hosts. This issue has been brought up multiple times and everyone would prefer the reviews be in date order. It makes it appear as if there are gaps in stays when people look at your reviews. I somewhat understand putting non English reviews at the end, but not others. Here in Seattle, for instance, we get a lot of Canadian guests due to our proximity to the border. It’s a shame that their reviews are at the end. It makes me not want to even accept foreign guests, which is counter to Airbnb’s message if inclusiveness, etc. Thanks for “listening” and please pass my comments on. I also look forward to an answer regarding my cohosting issue. Thanks! One more thing, in some instances the foreign reviews don’t show up at all. On the mobile app I can’t see them myself in preview mode.
By the way, if I look at my listing incognito via Google Chrome, the foreign reviews do show up at the end. On my iphone, however, they are MIA.
This was their last response to me: Hello again, thank you for that feedback. We will make sure to pass your thoughts and idea’s on to the correct department. Airbnb is built on the feedback of the community. As for your other question about Cohosting we see that a Case Manager has been assigned and you will be able to get the answers you need shortly. Thanks again for being such an asset to the Airbnb Community.
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Arlene, thank you so much for this. I’m most grateful for all the work you’ve done, on our behalf, to bring it to the attention of the company.
I’m especially impressed by this sentence, and hope the decision-making minds at airbnb consider it carefully.
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Hi there, thanks but all I did was tweet them about the problem and tell them how I feel (and I see I had a typo, oh well). I should have also mentioned that as a guest I want them in order as well, and even if it’s not in my native language it’s a piece of cake to translate these days (not sure why they don’t have a built in translator but that’s a other topic I guess). Now if more people contact them maybe they’ll actually listen!!!
Arlene- thanks for your thoughtful and clear explanation of this. I also noticed that our reviews were mixed chronologically but hadn’t noticed that the reviews from USA were listed first and then from other countries. I will also contact Airbnb and request that reviews appear in order regardless of country of origin.
They used an erroneous apostrophe? Well that says it all…
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I have had the same problem this is what i sent to Airbnb today. It seems that even management were not aware of this as i have been in contact with Airbnb for the last two months.
Thank you for contacting me yesterday and explain the new way that Airbnb are posting reviews.
I for one am very unhappy about that and I believe that hosts should have been informed prior to going ahead with something so controversial.
I am all for looking at properties through Airbnb with a different language. That’s fine. But not have old reviews posted first just because someone is from the same country and is logging in from there. No one and I mean no one wants to go to a restaurant say in Spain/Germany or the US with the first reviews from two or three years ago. Let alone a property that they want to rent. They want the most up to date reviews in every language. This is very bad policy and I am so surprised that Airbnb has moved in that direction . I think it will have an adverse effect on hosts and they will be looking to change to other platforms.
Just an FYI we love hosting that’s why we do it and we love having great reviews – but we want to see them straight away as in the previous system.
Please re-think this bad review policy.
I have had a response which below:
Thank you for sending, Linda. I am also sharing your feedback with a senior leader of our CX team. I personally think feedback like this only makes us better.
All the best,
Sarah
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How does an old review make us BETTER?
We have moved on… my rental has changed and improved… an old review is old news, now out of context and useless for today’s offerings.
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New wrinkle: I noticed this first on someone else’s listing and checked mine and found the same. Only reviews from the current month include both WHERE the guests is from and the month/year that they stayed.
They are stripping more and more information that could be helpful to future guests as they choose a place to stay.
I have contacted Airbnb about this too (no reply!). It is ridiculous to have 3 year old reviews higher up the listing than ones from the past few weeks/months. Guests need to see how the property is rated now, not what guests thought of it a few years ago. On my listing I have to look back several pages before I find my great reviews which mention the upgrades which I have recently carried out. If Airbnb want to mess about with the order of the reviews, for whatever reason, they should also include an option for guests to view all reviews in chronological order. That would allow reviews to be selected by country, if this is important to guests, or by date, which seems to me to be more relevant.
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Yes this is a great idea; let the guest order the reviews the way they prefer. This continues to really irritate me. We had a really awesome review from a couple more Canadians, and of course no one will ever see it. Their stay was followed by two Australians. I don’t think they’ve written a review yet, but who cares since no one will see it. Current guest is from California, so hoping they’ll write a review because tomorrow’s guests are from Brazil. I guess it’s just unfortunate that I’m getting so many foreigners. Maybe I need to discourage them somehow.