Unfortunately, some guests leave negative reviews for various reasons. A typical scenario involves retaliation; a guest may request unreasonable compensation and, when denied, retaliate with a negative review. Additionally, guests might report inaccurate issues. Others may fail to report any problems during their stay, only to criticize later in a review. This failure to report problems immediately contradicts our house rules, which require guests to report any issues as soon as they arise. Given these circumstances, I am considering pursuing the matter in small claims court.
Donât waste your time, youâll lose.
4 Likes
Sue? Not in this lifetime!
1 Like
One of the things about successfully suing someone for libel is that you have to demonstrate actual harm. Simply not liking what someone says or it being false isnât actionable in a court of law.
One thing that is needed for small claims is proof. How would you be able to prove that the guest lied, especially if Airbnb refused to remove the review. I think the judge would side with the guest because Airbnb allowed the review to stay and you couldnât remove it. Your best bet is to simply respond to his review or hope it gets buried under lots of great reviews. Go above and beyond for your next guests to get 5 stars and let the bad review get buried.
Google the small claims court website and find out what are your rights.
Well Davis, your original post about suing guests was almost two weeks ago so I was wondering how itâs going? Did you see your lawyer? What did they say about your chances?
1 Like
It absolutely possible.
But most of the time you just need a lawyer to send a letter and ask them to remove the review under thread of a lawsuit.
Most people donât want to be bothered and take the easy way out. There are lawyers specialised in online review removal.
1 Like
How to find a lawyer who can work on the review removal?
So far I am sending messages old guests, only one review has been removed
The proof is that the defects were not reported or they were settled. Thus according to my rules the rate shoudl not be decreased
Yes, the harm is not getting a superhost status, not showing in the Airbnb search at the first place
Many hosts who have lost and regained Superhost status, including me, can testify to the fact that no longer having the Superhost badge made zero difference to the number of bookings they got.
Airbnb doesnât even have a Superhost filter anymore.
Superhost is just a carrot Airbnb dangles to keep hosts stressed out and scared to deal appropriately with bad guests for fear of a bad review.
The fact that a host with pages of good reviews can lose Superhost status over a lying revenge review that Airbnb refuses to remove, that tanks your rating, makes it obvious that Superhost is not a reflection of excellent hosting.
6 Likes
Thank you, Excellent!
In terms of an actual civil proceeding, you have to have evidence that the review caused you to lose that status and that not having it matters. It doesnât seem like you have a good grasp of how civil litigation works. Whatever money youâve lost getting bad reviews is not going to be much compared to what you lose if you retain an attorney and lose your case.
1 Like
We just have to remember that for more than twenty five years, we have lived in a âreview societyâ and thereâs nothing we can do about it.
Guests have the opportunity to review us and we have the ability to review the services and products we have used.
After all these years, its very unlikely that things are going to be any different in the near future.
Unless reviews were completely banned (as if) all businesses, including STR businesses, are going to get a variety of reviews and all businesses have to realise this and live with it.
This said, if a business frequently gets poor reviews, then itâs easy to suspect that the business owner needs to take a good look at their procedures and systems.
If a host brings attention to themselves by attempting to sue for bad reviews, this canât be a good thing surely?
Thank you, The bad reviews are usually retaliation reviews
They appear to have replaced that with a âGuest Favoriteâ filter. We have it, but Iâm not sure why. We arenât SH, but only because we donât always get enough bookings in a year to qualify (we list on several platforms and most bookings are 6-7 nights)
Although we live in a review culture, the difference between a business being rated and reviewed on their own website, or on Amazon or Ebay, etc., as opposed to Airbnb, is that those other entities donât send the business owners threatening or chastising messages, telling them they need to improve, pull up their socks, or risk delisting just because they got some 4 star ratings.
True. Airbnb is determined to get a bad reputation it seems by acting in such a cavalier fashion.
I suppose, and Iâm trying to be charitable here, it helps to sort out the wheat from the chaff?
And I further suppose that the messages are all automatically generated and never seen or touched by a human being ⌠a good reason to ignore them.
Weâve all seen listings with poor ratings that donât get delisted after all, so I suspect that the emails arenât at all believable.
They might have a three-strikes thing with those emails but I bet itâs more than three strikes before action is taken - probably more like three dozen.