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I’m old enough to remember a time of no cell phones, of a pager, of when a fax machine was a new thing in an office an only one or two people were allowed to use it.
I get it. I will stop bitching about how the changes they do just sometimes make no sense at all. And I wasn’t asking for them to ask all of the hosts.
Wow, that takes me back! When I first moved to the States (1994) I was amazed that there were few cellphones and that people used pagers. Mind you, this was in the backwoods of South Florida 
It would bother me less if they’d give us a weekly heads up about what they were changing. That’s what you do with valued partners. Communicate.
I am in London and they have done the same thing… I didn’t even notice. Thanks for pointing that out. I will be calling them later to find out why…How ridiculous that my latest review from my Chinese guests is now found as my 6th review behind my UK guest from last November!!!
I think you just made my point for me.
@jaquo. This is misplaced trust. I know these kind of guys. No. They are not well-rounded enough to see the whole picture. One of the many reasons I left that world four years ago. These 'bros are fundamentally flawed humans. They see “tech”, not users.
So I have just been on the phone for 30 minutes to them. Firstly, the girl I spoke to wasn’t even aware of the change. Secondly, when she got back to me after 10 minutes on hold she confirmed that the changes had been made in the last weeks. When I ask her to explain why, she couldn’t. All she could offer was to inform the tech department about my issue. Thats that then… Once again Airbnb makes a change without consulting us hosts. Although this time it seems as though the change they have made is going to annoy guests too…
This is an easy fix for airbnb: list reviews by date. We are hosts just outside Amsterdam and the last Dutch guest we had was I think over a year ago but it indeed is always on the top of the list of reviews. It’s annoying because reviews written in Dutch are of no use to 98% of listing viewers and yet they come first.
Doesn’t the month and year of their stay show up next to their review for only the past month or so?
Edit: Sorry–I see I am wrong about this and month and date are listed for all guests. Maybe I dreamt it, or it was another tweak to the system. Maybe it happened before this reorder change. Anyway, I see a the few international guests we’ve had are now at the bottom of our reviews.
I think it depends on who is looking at the listing - I think if I were to look at your listing, I would see American reviews first. They are still in chronological order if you look at the host page, but if you look at the listing it puts the reader’s nationality first.
For me right now it looks like the guests home country comes first, followed by all other countries in reverse chronological order. I can see how it would be useful for guests from “rare” countries to prioritize people from the same place, but it also means that potential guests from the most popular countries will likely never see those from anywhere else if you have a lot of reviews from that country.
About 40% of my 117 reviews are from Canadians, but the longer stays (and better reviews) are mostly from non-Canadians and therefore buried for Canadian potential guests on page 8 right off the bat. Likewise American potential guests will never see that I’ve hosted people from Europe, South America and Asia because about another 40% of my reviews are from Americans.
Of course, now I realize that at a certain point individual reviews are meaningless… it’s nice if you get a good one on the first page, but soon enough it will be superseded and buried like all the others.
Thanks Alia,
I guess I should have known. It makes perfect sense.
Peter
what is the phone number to call and vent about this, pls ?
Hi I have been in contact with Airbnb regarding the new policy of reviews.
This is what i wrote:
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.