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Curious whether the experienced vets on this forum have been through something like this?
I went above and beyond for a recent guest…
So i’m thinking, ‘great, that’s another 5 stars rating in the bag’
However shortly after guest checked out they email me the following
Dear Rex Banner,
Thank you for the amazing stay, your kindness and hospitality. This was the best Airbnb I have ever stayed in (toot toot).
I just wanted to ask a favor? Would it be possible for you not to leave me any feedback please? I am a very private individual and I do not want to leave a digital footprint as anyone can see the places you have been based on your Airbnb profile.
Thanks again for your hospitality and if I am looking for a place in the area, I will be sure to come back.
Regards
Lenny
Of course they were also not planning on leaving me feedback too
I respect the guests wishes, but I was a little cheesed off as the guest stayed with me for the entire month.
If you been through something similar, chime in… and is there a way to avoid such a situation?
My Nov—April tends to be 30+ night rentals. For some reason they express their happiness with the rental & inquire about booking again then don’t leave a review. I don’t ask why.
I’ve not had a guest ask me to not leave a review. There’s a bizillion reasons…basic privacy to crazy ex. Honor it and roll on.
I know it is disappointing but not surprising. Privacy is a big issue lately. I myself feel bombarded by requests for reviews of service, products, etc. for anything acquired through the internet or traced by an email address. Consequently I rarely respond, but I do leave Airbnb reviews.
Hosts here tend to fall into one of two camps - those who shrug and move on and those who get worked up about it. (I’m a shrugger).
This is just one of the reasons that long term guests are a bad idea. Because I take one-nighters (although it’s rare) I could theoretically (pre-covid) get 30 reviews in the time you had just the one opportunity.
I’ve never had had an email requesting no review but I am careful about mentioning names in a review other than that of the booker. Although 30 days is a pretty long ‘dirty weekend’.
You can’t control other people and only yourself imperfectly. I’m a broken record on this but it’s true. So let that go.
Same here. I not only take one nighters, I prefer them. The longest anyone stayed was a month but it was off Airbnb. I had a dentist who stayed about a dozen times in Fall of 2018…not a single review. In parts of 2019 I was getting 20 reviews a month because I was doing lots of back to back one nighters. About 80% of my guests review, or did before the pandemic so I have over 600 reviews.
Going above and beyond and getting no review is better than doing a guest a favor and then getting a 3 star review which happened to me my first year.
I suggest if Lenny isn’t going to leave you a review you might as well as him a favor in return. Tell him if he ever returns to book with you directly.
What a silly viewpoint he has. Air reviews will not show up on a random 'net search.
.
It is what it is. Take the money and move on. We would not have done a long term stay on any OTA (tenancy risk and all that such entails).
I completely understand the guest’s request and never write reviews for a similar reason. I simply don’t like the idea of leaving a digital footprint easily associated with my real identity.
On comments saying people can’t search for your reviews, a program can easily collect any information a random unlogged-in person can manually click and view. I am able to view reviews of previous hosts who have reviewed my potential guests, and with some web sleuthing can also view reviews of those other hosts as hosts as well as guests, and so on. A program can also (slowly) emulate the behavior of a logged-in user.
I am surprised. Reviews help good guests & good hosts
It’s a bit one sided for you to expect a guest to leave your rental a review which future guests use as a prompt/cue your rental is good.
You don’t do the same for your guest because you don’t want to leave a digital footprint?
Too late now. In the USA if I know a property address, I can get owner name & their home address from a quick public records search.
My 87 year old father thought because he doesn’t use a computer he would not appear in a Google search. He shocked when I showed him what was out there. To think otherwise is naive at best.
Yes to all of your above comments, except that I don’t strongly care if my guests leave a review for me either, though I suppose if months go by without anyone leaving a review, that might look slightly odd (but still doesn’t affect your overall review rating if it is already high).
There’s no way to avoid it, and I wouldn’t care unless my listing was new and short on reviews. It could be a setback for a listing that is just starting out and provides stays of only 30 days or longer, and if that was the case, I’d politely ask the guest to reconsider leaving a review.
I agree. Receiving or giving a review is nothing compared to the digital footprint generated by creating an Airbnb account and using the Airbnb app.
So you are benefitting from guests leaving reviews, yet you won’t extend the same benefit to the guests or other hosts? I just don’t understand that sort of self-interest without giving back.
You can’t force someone to leave a review. You could remind him he since he enjoyed his stay, he would be helping you get future bookings and help guests find a good place to stay.
A review gap if 30-90 days is no big deal. Many host list on more than one platform so the Airbnb reviews won’t show the VRBO reviews so there are gaps. Also hosts like me have very seasonal rentals so no surprise there are gaps.
Correct. I didn’t ask them to leave reviews but do benefit from their appreciation. You really don’t understand self interest? We are all self interested in our own ways.
List a property, make money, decide not to participate in the social/business norm of the review process which is described repeatedly as important for the model to work for guests & future hosts.
I review almost all my guests. I’ve missed a couple because I got busy & missed the deadline.
Nah, it’s self interest as duly noted by others and myself. You have the freedom to judge this attitude of course. To me it would be like me (unfairly) judging gregarious extroverted Facebook public wall or Twitter posters as show-offy, virtue signaling, humble bragging, and egocentric echo chamber mongers. I’m introverted and private compared to the average person and never use social media for anything other than one-one messages, most certainly not the Facebook (bathroom) wall, although I’m not philosophically opposed to scrawling on an actual bathroom wall given its anonymity, assuming the establishment doesn’t mind it or appears to encourage it.
We all have our personality quirks and self-centerisms and mine in my view is hardly egregious. My view of the world is I have the freedom to choose how I act unless constrained otherwise by a formal or verbal agreement or by law, especially in a business.
FWIW, if it makes you feel better, I had a nasty guest this week, my first bad experience, who showed up as three after booking for two, and refused to pay when confronted with the building’s security camera evidence. He really does make me want to write a factual negative review for the benefit of other hosts (so they don’t get lured by his small number of positive reviews like I was), but I admittedly haven’t actually done so yet and am hardly dying to do so.
I hear you and refer you to my reply to @Annet3176. The privacy is as much about personality as online privacy.
But it is also about online privacy. As a tech expert with the ability to fairly easily obtain compromising information about most anyone while staying within legal limits, I’d say online privacy is all about how high you make the bar. Just like real world security and privacy, nothing is absolutely bulletproof. I host anonymously and my adopted host name is gender anonymous. Sure, if someone knows your address, they can know who the owner is. But only booked guests know your address. And they still don’t know for sure who the host really is or if the owner is even the host.
My last response and will stop after, promise. Some people are different from the norm and different from you. You might find them ridiculous or even weirdos, but consider that they might just be different.
I provide a fantastic hosting service to my guests and my guests feel it (and happen to effuse publicly about it of their own volition). I am confident that Airbnb has no issue with introverted hosts/guests like me and values my hosting business and is comfortable with my usage of the freedom they grant me to choose to not leave reviews. If they incentivized writing reviews (like Amazon or third parties do for some customers), I might think differently. Otherwise I neither seek nor care to write reviews.
We are all self interested in our own ways.