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Actually, I believe that all the reviews are on the listing page, but they are sorted HOME COUNTRY, and then some yet-to-analyzed order after that. I hate this, to be honest. Since I have lots of foreign visitors, sometimes it appears that I haven’t had a guest for three months when I haven’t had even one open night!
From a guests’ perspective, I understand that they will see reviews in a different order than you do. They will see reviews from their fellow country people first, and then in some yet-to-be-analyzed order after that.
Thank you very much for providing the details. I noticed that many reviews are missing from the listing (they show on the Stats Page), but I didn’t figure out that the missing reviews are the ones left by foreigners.
So many problems with this, even though I can see how it makes sense on paper.
The review that comes first is for an international student; he used his American college as his address.
And i will have to look more closely, but the first ten reviews, they appear to have just chosen one review from each month. I can’t remember if I only hosted one review giving American a month, or what. I’ve always loved the reviews that people write in their native languages - makes me feel cosmopolitan even though I rarely leave my neighborhood these days.
I guess this is yet another reason I need to drum up more local business. Bleah.
I called Airbnb (please send me a cocktail) to discuss this problem. As usual, it took forever to convince the customer service representative, Liz, that there is a problem. She said that as of June 1 all foreign reviews would be grouped by country (regardless of language) at the end of the reviews. I told her that I had checked all of my reviews and that the ones written by foreigners are missing from the listing. I then had to educate her about the mechanics of the reviews. She pointed out that the foreigners reviews show on the host profile, just not on the listing. I told her that this is obviously a glitch. She said that she would write a ticket and alert the technical team.
Yep, I think you’ve nailed it. I told the representative that it would be nice if hosts would receive an email blast when they made a change. I also pointed out that an email blast is probably cheaper than countless customer service calls for the same issue.
Yes, they keep screwing with stuff without telling anyone. A little notification would be nice. Better still, just leave it alone. There’s this concept of: If It Ain’t Broken, Don’t Fix It.
I make homemade raspberry gin. I’ll add some peach schnapps, a little ginger liqueur, some blackberry brandy. We can call it the Customer Service Cockup. I mean cocktail.
Yes i noticed this a while ago and am really irritated by it. We get a lot of Canadian guests and a few other foreigners. Some really fantastic reviews will never be seen because they are at the end. We’ve only had one family with a small child stay for example. They were from Argentina and wrote a fantastic review mentioning how well it worked for them and their little boy. It was written in English, but it’s at the end, next to our German guests, Canadian guests, Israeli guests, etc reviews. I don’t understand their thinking on this at all!!!
The customer service representative I spoke with said that when people in other countries search for listings; the reviews by their countryfolk will show first. I told her that I really preferred that they be in date order. In my case the reviews from foreigners are not there at all.
This is the first time that I hear of this. Why, why does Airbnb decides to play with things. If they want to show some reviews from that country great… but come on.
Airbnb is known for their data-driven A/B testing approach. Talking to airbnb dev team, I learned that weekly changes is one of the main rules for their technical team and is a great motivator to evolve these days.
Because anything that is based on the internet is constantly changing and companies have to adapt to this - if not be the instigators of these changes. Some years ago I was asked to give a talk to the web design students at the local college. In the letter requesting the talk it said ‘the internet is changing every year’.
I responded and said that they were wrong - the internet changes every day, every hour, even every minute. Any internet based service has to grow and adapt. Sometimes these changes will fail. Sometimes they will result in fabulous improvements.
Remember the websites of twenty years ago? They were so basic. I was designing and building sites then and I am totally embarrassed to think about them now. (Last time I looked one was still live and I cringe when I see it!)
Something that is new technology today is old within a couple of days. But if companies don’t try, others will, so they’ll be left behind. We might not like changes, but in the long run many of them will be to our advantage.
It’s the way of the world - or at least, the internet world. Think back twenty years (or ten if you’re not old enough to remember that far back). iPhones were new in 2007. There were no apps then. Technology has advanced enormously since then. Today, our lives are on our phones.
Sadly there’s no way that Airbnb can consult the 3 million (from their latest figures) hosts about changes they wish to make. And if they did, it would take forever to collate all the responses.
Sticking my neck out here but I’d say that the techies at Airbnb are far more knowledgeable than the average host about improving the app experience for everyone. There are many hosts who admit that they are troglodytes when it comes to technology. There’s even evidence of that here at this forum.
I’m okay at this internet malarkey but trust the well-funded Airbnb techies to be much more knowledgeable than I am.
