Airbnb now (Dec 2022) asking hosts for more detailed reviews of guests

I just had my first one like that last week. The information is shared with hosts, but not publically. That’s your public profile that you’re showing there.

For the details that the guest gave you, you have to go to your “Insights” page and then to quality. The same place you get to see any private feedback along with the review. Here’s a (partial) screenshot of the review that the guest left me:

And to see the details that you left the guest or details that another host left your guest then you go to your calendar page (on the website, not sure about the app) and click on the reservation. It will be there on the right where they have their star rating.Like this:

I don’t ask our guests to take out the trash either but almost all of them take it out anyway. I still ticked on “took care of garbage”. It doesn’t matter to me if they were asked to do it or not. I believe it to be decent human behavior and will give “credit” to the guests who do take it out.

Don’t know if any info is given on boxes not ticked or not. I really doubt it. But I know I checked all the boxes for these guests and imagine they checked all of them for us too (they’re repeat guests). Since you didn’t tick on the trash for your guests you should be able to tell if there’s any note of it when you look at their rating section.

Regardless, it won’t take long for us all to have the boxes memorized so that we may notice a guest who didn’t get a box ticked. I suppose I might notice that your guests didn’t take out the garbage if I looked at it, I don’t know. It wouldn’t deter me from them or anything though. If you’re concerned about it you could use the box that says, “something else” to note “I don’t request that guests deal with the garbage”. You’ll see that I used that box to mention how well-behaved their dogs are.

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I don’t quite understand how we would see the checked off things from other hosts. I guess I’ll see it at some point, but I’m curious now. The screenshot above shows what things JJD herself checked, but where will we see what other hosts checked off for a guest? If 5 hosts marked clean and tidy, are we going to see 5 check marks or what?

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No, you see everything that was checked by a particular host, as a list, like in the screenshot, underneath the text of each individual review. There’s the review text as before then the list of things ticked off. But for each review, not amalgamated.

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They’ve been asking guests heaps of extra questions for years now, and never shared any of it with us hosts. I was initially hopeful that this new system would allow me, the host, to see any custom review notes left for guests, but so far I haven’t seen anything.

Black hole indeed!

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This has unfortunately always been there: “…and tell them what they can do better”. Especially for new guests, this prompts them to search their memory for fails and subtly suggests that a 5 star for a category is too high…

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I posted about this recently with a screenshot of this info. This is for a guest who booked but didn’t stay. He was at my home at 7:30 am trying to get in but didn’t return to stay for the night he booked.

josh

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I’ve only started seeing it in the last week or two. Here’s an upcoming guest on my calendar but he’s the first one I’ve seen with the new review information, other than the one I reviewed.

Appears to be only showing the positive things we say (plus any comments), looking at the one I just posted and the one @KKC posted. But if you compare both of them to the guest I recently reviewed (in my first response) it’s obvious that they were better guests because they have far more boxes ticked. Even if the star ratings were the same, you could tell if someone is an exceptional guest.

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This is better than nothing but it’s not going to replace an honest review. I’ve long been an advocate of the honest and unemotional review. Here is my review that is cut off of the screenshot above:

josh review

Here my review of another guest I wouldn’t host again:
ling

Yet another:

Julio

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Yes, I hope this change doesn’t lead to hosts just writing “Good guest” and thinking that just checking boxes is adequate.

At least one of the choices shouldn’t be there, IMO- “Took care of garbage”. It presumes that hosts all ask guests to take the garbage out, that it’s something basic and expected, like good communication and leaving the place tidy, when it isn’t. Especially in home-share listings and many entire homes, as well.

I hate the adjectives on the checklist for guests’ reviews of hosts. “Pristine”, “Squeaky Clean”, “Spotless”. Pristine literally means “in its original state” or as if brand new. So Airbnbs are now all supposed to be new builds, with brand new furniture, the place looking like no one has ever occupied it before?

Honestly, those adjectives sound straight out of a 1950s commercial, with a June Cleaver-type orgasming over her sparkling kitchen floor.

You notice the checklist for guests doesn’t use any of these flowery adjectives that indicate perfection. No “Spotlessly neat and tidy”, no “Articulate and
thorough communication”, no “Kept in perfect condition”. Instead guests get kudos for “good” condition, while hosts apparently have to present things in “pristine” condition.

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Me, too. For those of us with glamping accommodations (open houses, yurts, etc.), the property will never be spotless or squeaky-clean. Beachside accommodations will most likely have a few spots of rust here and there. Yet another broad-brush approach that doesn’t work from a company that advertises their huge diversity in accommodations as a selling point.

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Pristine additionally has the definition of “clean and fresh as if new; spotless”. That’s my goal for the kitchen. I don’t want the current guest to have any experience or see any evidence of the previous guest in the kitchen. The house is 125 years old and the rugs and furniture are nearly all used/vintage/antique but everything in the kitchen gets detailed and polished until it’s spotless and feels pristine.

It may not be relevant or important in some listings and I totally get that. But if guests started consistently leaving out those kitchen comments then that could be useful information for me.

It’s only private feedback from the guest to the host. It’s not on the public listing page, no one else sees it.

It’s akin to those “compliments” things we used to have by the reviews. They never made much sense to me, I found them annoying. Some guests thought they should only pick one and some guests would pick all of them. It was just random information on the listing and I’m not sure what guests even made of them.

It seems a vast improvement to me to have them be private and not on our listing page. Personally, I don’t mind the feedback and I am sure, from my last few stays :grimacing:, that hosts could generally use this kind of specific feedback. Some of it will be relevant and some of it won’t. At least it’s not right above our reviews for everyone to scratch their heads about.

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Huh, must be an uneven rollout because I have guests coming every week and this is the first guest where they’ve asked me to tick these checkboxes

It always is. That’s how they do rollouts. I was wondering if anyone has seen the total price on the map feature yet? It hasn’t shown up for me.

It’s shown total price in Australia for as long as I remember – must be a national law thing

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Probably is, I think it’s that way in the EU too. In the US, the total price is shown in the list that you scroll through but only the nightly rate is shown on the map. Hotels here have always advertised the nightly rate in that manner. The rate doesn’t include the parking, taxes, resort fee, pet fee, roll-out fee, etc, it’s only ever shown the nightly rate. There’s been a certain amount of outrage about it but Airbnb didn’t start it. It was well-established long before they were ever thought of.

Being a US company they just did what was familiar to the accommodations audience. Hotels still only show the nightly rate. They won’t change it and it will probably give them an advantage over Airbnb (it will certainly make them look much cheaper). Personally, I get mostly US guests and am not that excited about the system being changed on them. I know that looking at prices on a map I assume that it’s only the nightly rate that doesn’t include anything else and assume I’ll be paying additional beyond it. If it’s already all included it will look like it’s priced too high. Not sure if that makes sense but it’s because we’re used to accounting for it I guess.

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I haven’t seen it yet.

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Except it may taint the guest’s thinking when they give the overall rating. With these adjectives, they’ll think 5 stars is too much for cleanliness if there is a speck of dust somewhere or a spider.

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That private feedback is only seen by the guest after the reviews are published, it’s part of the review. So it can’t influence their review.

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The star rating is first and then they scroll down to those compliment things. They could get philosophical about the wording and then scroll back up the page and change the star rating but it’s hard to imagine a guest going through that much extra trouble. :wink:

You’ve mentioned concerns about cleaning rating stuff in the past because your house is open-air. I understand the issue because people can be so dumb.

My places are so tiny and so old and on an awful little dead-end street behind a school parking lot in an awful little city that I personally despise. So, I have to worry about the kitchen being pristine because that is really all that I’ve got. It’s all that I can control, so I do it. But you don’t have to worry about that. You have a truly beautiful property in a very beautiful location and are an exceptional host. I say screwem. You should too. (Aren’t you a Houston girl?)

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If we weren’t talking about AirBnB, I’d agree with you. But after ABB’s Global Head of Hosting used a leaf in an outdoor pool (oh, no, a leaf outside!) as an example of setting expectations so guests aren’t given refunds, I’m a little gunshy.
And, yes, I’m currently a Houston gal, but I grew up in Iowa, the land of polite people.

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