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Well that is the life of a host.
Just as we celebrated our #400 review (with an 4.7 something average) #401 comes in: A millennial female programmer girl from Moscow. Half an A4 of nitpicking, nonsense and wrong expectations, en even some lies. Starting with that she does not like to write negative reviews but…
So I looked back to her other reviews, she only wrote 4 and 3 of them were negative, with nitpicky comments along the same line.
So there is a red line here.
Tempting to respond that, I thought there was something wrong with our place, but after reading the other reviews, it is our the place but her personality.
But I am just, going to bite my tongue. I shrug it off, because after 400 mostly positive reviews, this one really does not have an impact on our rating or future booking.
I will give her review to the cleaners to double check the remarks, and move on.
Well, the danger with these millennials they can not handle critique very well, if you go against them, they get butthurt and start personal war over it, and go onto every review site they can find and spam negative reviews.
They probably even ask their whole family and friends to also leave a bad review.
Regardless, I’d encourage you to use the AirReview plugin to screen future guests. If you aren’t on instant book, you can decline such guests. If you are on instant book, you can prepare yourself to manage the guest’s unreasonable expectations.
“Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can’t understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation’s clothes and hair suddenly retro.”
Chuck Palahniuk
We often say on here we shouldn’t be hostage to reviews but it’s hard. I don’t have my listing on those other open sites so only have to worry about Airbnb reviews. Actually now you’ve said that I might suggest you message her really gently reminding her that her actions are not without consequence. It feels like she shouldn’t just get away with it.
I once had a millennial who turned dark triad when he didn’t get his own way of dominating all my space and my other guest too. He actually wrote fake nasty reviews about me on professional websites! If I could have afforded a PI I would have put him away. Outrageous.
That’s why most hotel decors are based on limited interraction, limited access, mud tone decors, muted lighting, more mud tinted carpeting, and no cooking. You can’t critique what you can’t see. Unless you are CSI.
Airbnb is sharing somebody’s home. It’s not working for her. That little Chrome extension proves it. Host at your risk
You go the guest profile, and look at the reviews they received.
You can click on the review to go to the host profile. And then scroll trough the reviews to find the one the guest left.
I did call AirBnB and asked them if there was anything that could be done.
Because I have over 40 reviews on that listing and only 4 and 5 star reviews with a 4.7 average, and that this 1 star review suddenly put my listing at risk and AirBnB wants me to improve. I said that I do not mind a fair review, but this one was over the top, and that the 1 star felt more as a revenge.
I did not ask them to remove the review. I told them to leave it, because it was so far over the top, that a potential guest would look right trough it. (I got 3 new bookings for the same listing since the review).
But I did ask them if it was possible to increase the rating to 3 stars which would be a lot fairer.
After the call I got a mail that I would be forwarded to a case manager. I replied to the mail with the exact same story: Leave the review, so over the top almost fun to read, but please find a solution for the impact on my star rating.
I am now sorry I did not copy and store it somewhere. I made a print of it, for my cleaners to double check some of the issues, but I did not keep a copy for myself.
Maybe she left a similar star rating on the other reviews where she was negative and Air considered that to be a pattern and retaliatory. It would be pretty hard to run into only one decent host out of five +. You’d have to have some terrible luck. I hope they boot her off the platform. Thank goodness they removed her review.
I’m glad they removed the review, Chris! I recently wrote how Airbnb removed my guest’s unreasonable review, which was 3 stars across the board, except for cleanliness, which was 4, because the place was “too clean”. Since the public part of the review was short and nice, I did not expect Airbnb will actually remove it, but I tried, based on the fact that it was obvious that the guest did not understand the meaning of particular star categories and was mostly basing its grades on the fact that my mother did not pet their dog. Maybe they decided to remove it because I was really not bothering them much in the past 6 years? Hmm.
Since the public part of the review was short and nice, I did not expect Airbnb will actually remove it, but I tried, based on the fact that it was obvious that the guest did not understand the meaning of particular star categories and was mostly basing its grades on the fact that my mother did not pet their dog.