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Just curious
Who actually reads reviews of guest?
…and have you ever actually seen a guest with bad reviews?
I think reviewing guests is stupid - the only time I would ever dream of giving a guest a bad review is if they tried to hurt my business by leaving a false or unfair review to me… but with Airbnb’s set up- this isn’t possible. So no guest is likely to ever receive a bad review from me no matter how annoying or troublesome they are.
BUT I have told Airbnb, since their set up for guest reviews is pretty useless, I don’t care what other hosts say about this guest- I only would be interested in reading reviews that guest left other hosts. If I was reading the guest’s reviews and saw that they never gave anyone 5 stars or had crazy expectations or were unappreciative of their hosts… That might make a difference to me as to whether or not I would rent to them. Why can’t we see their reviews? Don’t you think it would be more useful?
What if when guests get bad reviews - the smart pricing feature automatically gives them higher prices? That would be cool- hosts get paid more for having to deal with trouble-guests?
Who else would appreciate that feature?
I couldn’t disagree more @MistressoftheManor. Host reviews are the backbone or how Airbnb works, helping hosts understand whether a guest is someone you might want to host.
I am surprised to hear you wouldn’t leave a bad review for a guest who trashed your house, stole from you, damaged your furniture, threw up all over your bathroom and left the mess there, woke your neighbours up at three a.m. by partying etc
Or that this would be something you wouldn’t take into consideration when deciding whether to host someone.
You can read reviews guests have left for other hosts.
I wouldn’t host bad guests at any price, so no, wouldn’t appreciate hosting if they paid more.
There is a way to do this. If you use chrome as your browser, add an extension called AirReview. It will automatically bring up all the reviews a guest has left for hosts. I don’t like nitpicking guests so this nifty little add on saved me from booking a person who just had to bash the host for all the details that were in the listing title. Review for “tiny place by the waterfront” included several sentences about how tiny the place was, and they weren’t complimentary. Happily declined the woman. Nitpickers aren’t welcome here.
You certainly can read reviews written about guests. I did so just last night. Use a real computer, not the app on a tablet or your phone. I read guest reviews all the time. With MS Edge I don’t even need an app.
I almost always read reviews of the guest. And yes I’ve hosted a guest with a bad review; a “I would not host these people again they were the worst ever” kind of review. It was back in 2014 and it was part of a group booked by someone else. He had multiple good reviews since so I wasn’t too worried when he instant booked my place. Still I feel that is was good to be aware.
I have also had several guests who had reviews that weren’t awful but that had a warning about some issue like “this guest and I had a personality conflict.” In most cases and certainly with any review like that I also read the review the guest left for the host. Forewarned is forearmed. For example I had a guest who had a couple of so-so reviews where she shared the house with the host. After reading her reviews I felt that I knew how to make her happy in her stay. My room is attached to my house but separate.
As for not leaving reviews, I hope you will reconsider this and start doing your part. We don’t have much say in who uses the platform but if we all review then maybe we can weed out some the the guests and hosts who shouldn’t be on Airbnb.
We check the reviews hosts have made of potential guests and if there seems to be some issue also check the reviews the guest has made. If we are still concerned we will reach out to the potential guest and request additional information. Please DO leave reviews!
We had to leave a negative review, only the second since we started in 2011:
We DO NOT RECOMMEND XXXX TO OTHER AIRBNB HOSTS.
+Reservation made for 2. 10 people were at Tumnus House
+XXXX refuses to pay for additional guests- denies claim/refuses to pay for extra 8 guests
+Late arrival after check-in time-
+Poor Communication- little response to messaging
+Damage to floor and wall
+Dog hair on furniture and bedding (Service dogs)
+Violated numerous House Rules
+Check-out procedures not followed
The review that was left was:
“We’re thrilled to escaped the city to spend the holidays together. The location is beautiful. Even more because we experienced winter wonderland on Saturday when the snow stop by the location. However, their communication and attention are very demanding compared to pervious Airbnb owners. They required to meet and greet once we check in, they also check in the number of guests because they have troublesome in the past with the number of guests. They are constantly to check in with us throughout the entire weekend. We only stayed less 48 hours. They did not respect our time value which we wish to spent time together for the holiday before we fly out to reunite with their loved ones. On another note, the house is very coziness and small. It made the guests to stay closer and enjoying the winter wonderland.”
Our response:
What a shame that your experience at Tumnus House was unsatisfactory. Yes, we do like to meet and greet guests at Cair Paravel to orient them to the house and it’s unusual characteristics such as an antique professional gas range. Most of our guests appreciate the additional communication and services we offer. This was the 2nd time in the seven years and more than1,230 bookings we have hosted through Airbnb that we had a guest arrive with more guests than the number indicated on the reservation. We were very disconcerted to find that rather than the two guests your group consisted of 10 people especially since you had said “Thank you letting me know. I will have to disinviting additional 6 people. I will have to keep for two people. Thank you for communicating with us.” We are sorry that you felt your vacation was disrupted as we tried to resolve the issues of the 8 additional unregistered guests and the violations of our House Rules. BTW: We checked on you three times 1.) to greet you on Saturday morning, 2.) to leave a note asking if your unregistered guests were staying the 2nd night, 3.) since the roads were snow covered to save you the trip to the main farmhouse for check-out. All of the visits were announced through the Message Center.
Unfortunately, although we contacted Airbnb when we discovered that there were more guests we were unable to recover the additional rent, damage, and cleaning charges since the guest denied the claims.
Lesson learned. Even though there was 4’ of snow on the ground and it was still snowing, and we had a double 50th birthday party starting with around 100 guests… we should have evicted them. As it has been said many times in this forum…stick to your house rules. We run a farmstead as well an Airbnb business…As it has been said in my agritourism council meetings…farming is not missionary work…and I extend that to vacation lodging.
I read all the reviews and sometimes read the reviews guests have left for hosts. I realize that most hosts are leary to leave negative reviews so sometimes you have to read between the lines (or lack of information as the case may be). Sometimes if the guest is new and it’s something not egregious, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and give them some info in the private feedback. What I really wish about the review system is that there was a way to distinguish what I call “low impact” guests from others. You know the type of guest I mean. The ones that stayed for 3 nights but only used 2 towels total, ate one snack and barely looked like they stayed, vs. the ones that stayed for one night and used 6 towels, left small stains on them, cleaned out the snack basket, left a lot of garbage etc. I know I could talk about it in the review, but both sets of guests were generally good and didn’t do anything that bad…IDK, I just feel like the reviews don’t generally tell me anything that valuable.
So far my guests have all been pleasent (but one). Little things like broken wine glasses, the odd missing towel I will ignore and still give good feedback.
I had ONE nightmare guest he…
Changed dates and times numrerous times.
Was rude to my cleaning lady.
Smoked weed in my apartment (I’m pretty open minded and I will usually ignore this issue, but my apartment stunk for days after badly - we were not talking about a quick crafty joint, he must of smoked up for days).
Left the door wide open when he left with every light and fan turned on.
Complained at 2am that he didn’t like my Hungarian neighbors as they were Roma -
there are 45 families in my building two are Roma, in Hungary 10% of the population are Roma. I am lucky the Roma in my building are actually really nice and well integrated - not the bad type. So I do not feel the need to write on my air b and b this fact and he moaned.
Phoned me at 4am to ask what is the Hungarian word for left.
So I felt that he needed the bad review! Other hosts need to be warned.
I don’t feel like they are valuable either especially after I learned that not leaving reviews has a far better effect on your ranking in the Airbnb system. I used to just leave reviews after each check out and was sometimes irritated when I left a relatively lousy guest a good review & they left me a very critical, nitpicky review. I hate receiving a review that something annoyed them after the fact when it was a really easy problem that could have taken me 3 minutes to remedy if they had but mentioned it, but they tell the world instead of me (the one person who could have solved the problem for them). Airbnb lets you respond to those reviews however I realized responding to nitpicky reviews just leaves them wide open (as opposed to condensed (sometimes the critical portion wasn’t visible without opening) and draws more attention to them, also makes me look defensive when I was only trying to tell future guests that the problem is solved now. So in hopes for better reviews, I discovered that if I left a review & sent the guest a message “I just sent you a 5 star review for being such a respectful & thoughtful guest! If you’d like, you can share with future guests what they can look forward to at my property and if you have any suggestions for improvement, you can share with me in the private feedback section.” This cut down on some of the public critique that I didn’t appreciate but still sometimes I did not get all 5 stars. THEN a friend of mine gave me a tip: “don’t leave reviews at all!” he said, “that is how to become a super host”. SO I tried it. And sure enough, next thing I know I’m a super host. It has been my experience that avoiding the reviews all together is the best approach with Airbnb because no stars is better than low stars and many people don’t bother to leave reviews without pressure to do so.
but see— you are copy and pasting reviews = rendering the review truly useless. If you aren’t genuinely reviewing each guest for THEIR personal actions, what good is your review to other hosts? I learn nothing about this guest from you so its not really worth reading for me as a host.
It’s just a little thank you note to your guest essentially & has no need to be public at all.
And I do this personally- I send them a hand written card of my artwork (since they meet me & know I am an artist) in the mail thanking them for their visit.
I would talk to the guest and deal with the offense personally - I do not feel it is my place to publicly humiliate them when they might learn from me that their behavior is not appreciated and improve in the future (past life as a high school teacher left me to believe in second chances because everyone can learn). I remember having an ill guest leaving their barf bucket and “gifts” in the toilet, a pile of dirty dishes, it was totally gross… but I felt compassionate that they obviously had been ill and were clearly not feeling up to cleaning up after themselves… and then I saw the review they left me saying that it wasn’t clean enough for them when they checked in because the top of the wardrobe was dusty and there was an empty water bottle under the bed left by a previous guest… I am 5’2 and appreciate that I now know that the top of the wardrobe which I cannot reach without a ladder gets dusty & might offend guests, and that I need to check more carefully under the bed that I admittedly have not always crawled under between guests (my vacuum reaches under there but clearly from the vacuum noise or whatever I failed to notice an empty water bottle). If it was me… I’d throw the bottle away or wipe down the top the wardrobe if it bothered me… it wouldn’t occur to me to complain about it on a public forum to complete strangers with the assumption that these instances were likely to occur again for future guests. If it REALLY seemed unacceptable , I’d personally tell the host to their face that they need to step up the cleaning. And I would never dream of leaving my vomit, excrement, or dishes for another person to clean up EVER. I was once horribly ill at a friend’s house and I was so horrified because, in the dark I had to throw up and saw the toilet but failed to notice the lid was still shut… big mess. BUT his mother kept in every room what was needed to clean it & I was fortunate to be able to clean it all up without anyone being the wiser. Because of that experience I always keep what is needed to clean a space IN that space so that no one has to embarrass themselves if they have an accident. I found it hard to understand that someone concerned about a little dust and a water bottle could leave such a vile mess for me without any warning or apology… very curious double-standard. But my point being: I might have wanted to warn future hosts about the creepy double standard more than I was offended by the gross mess I had to clean (which quite possibly may have not been how they would have left it, if they had been well enough to tidy up? I can’t really know if they left the mess because they felt it was my responsibility to clean up after them or if they were too sick to clean as they might have liked to)… didn’t want to embarrass them by leaving a bad review but after I read their review felt bitter about having to clean up after such a critical and inconsiderate person.
Please let me start by stating that I think you are a good writer because you are communicating well but…dang-it!..your last post made me cross-eyed! Please break up dense texts with the use of paragraphs, whether grammatically correct or not. Eyes need a rest.
I know in one instance, it took me four times to read the sentence because my confused eyes kept skipping back to the beginning of that sentence. Other sentences had me bouncing back or forth as I tried to focus and stay on track.
I agree wholeheartedly that Airbnb Reviews are mostly useless (to hosts). One reason is that hosts tend to leave generic reviews, (whilst guests leave more detailed). This was not the case in the beginning with Air. Back then you could see the review, so no need to respond on your own listing’s reviews, which as you pointed out in this thread, only add a flashing neon light to the negative review, instead of a light “explanation” for the situation. Another reason is the relative ease with creating profiles on the site. If each and every guest HAD to have a government ID, and had to be verified (as with Turo or car rental agencies), then you would never have a guest simpley make a new profile (with a different email address and/or telephone number and/or even ID, since these aren’t cross-referenced), and get back into booking on the site. This, IMO is a serious security failure with Air that needs to be addressed. Hosts assume ALL the risks with the site. ALL. In my experince with hosting over a decade now with Airbnb, (and VRBO, etc. before), guests couldn’t care less about their own reviews, becase they can simply pack up and start over with a new profile. A host on the other hand, not only invests time, money and effort into the listing, but also works hard to get those reviews and build them up. In the beginnning years of Air, they were exceptional and a wonderful buisness partner to hosts. Now, they are all about the numbers. CS reps are stil outstanding, but their hands are tied it seems, as the company size and reach grew. These are just some thoughts. We are still eternally grateful for the opportunity to use our home as an income source, and will never disparage or bite the hand that feeds us or throw the baby out with the bathwater, but these defects do need some attention, and the company is now to the level where it certainly has the resources to address these defects.
I have never left a generic review for a guest. All of them are tailored to the experience I had of hosting a guest.
Each and every guest I have has to have government ID or else they can’t book with me.
This is not about disparaging people it is about being honest about the experience of hosting them.
Airbnb is built on on trust and a sharing community. We only know what it is like to host someone, if other hosts share their experiences with us. Reviews are also valuable for guests and some hosts only accept guests who have reviews.
By the way can you break up your posts into short paragraphs having solid blocks of text make it hard to read them.
