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Hello all
We recently got knocked down from our 5 star rating (by our hundredth guest who was a first-timer and burnt a hole in our carpet with incense, bless) and I wanted to know how many reviews I would need to recover the rating. After doing the workings quickly in my head I thought I’d check the answer out on a spreadsheet, which I did. I’m sure other hosts will have the same enquiry at some time or other and I can see that wootwoot1234 had a similar question back in 2017 How (exactly) is the star rating calculated?
I’m sorry the link is bit of a mouthful but the sheet itself is pretty simple, follow the instructions and it’ll tell you how many guests you’ll need to host before you get back to 5 stars. In my case it’s 25, providing I don’t host another airhead idiot.
I might have done something wrong but didn’t get the correct answer.
We’ve had 65 reviews. Our rating shows as 4.95. All the categories show as 5.0 except value is shown at 4.9. So I entered 65 reviews and one lost star, and your spreadsheet shows 5.0, but the reality is 4.95.
To get to the 4.95 rating I need to enter 18 lost stars. So did we really lose 18? How would I know how many stars I lost without going back and checking every rating?
Would I be right in thinking that because your program shows we lost 18 stars to get at the 4.95 rating that indeed we lost 18 stars over 65 reviews?
Further, would it be correct to say that even though our rating shows ‘5.0’ in every category except for value that we could have lost stars in categories other than ‘value’ but they’ve been rounded to ‘5.0.’ Or do we know that we lost all 18 stars in ‘value’?
It’s hard to say, it could be all in one category but more likely spread across the board. For us, we lost one for location, one for value, two for accuracy and one for being lovely (that’s the mystery missing category)
So, because I don’t believe that we ever got an overall rating less than ‘4,’ we must have received three overall ratings of ‘4’ out of 65. ‘x’ is the number of additional reviews.
So, in our situation, we would need 10 more reviews with an overall rating of 5 to get a 5.0 rating (assuming that 4.96 would round to 5.0). See below:
Correct. It is pretty much impossible to get back to a 5* rating once you have lost it, so it seems like a waste of time and brain cells to spend time on these calculations. Especially since you have no control over the rating a guest leaves.
Hmmm. I would have thought that the overall rating was the agglomeration of all the categories, not something pulled out of thin air.
I’ve based this on the ratings given by individual guests. Each guest has the opportunity to give a rating out of five, in six categories. That equates to thirty possible stars for each review … 30 x 109 = 3270.
I think it’s ok and hopefully I’ll find out in 25 more reviews’ time.
Well – ha ha – @Debthecat doesn’t ‘explain’ that you can’t get back to to 5.0; she simply states it.
As for @Brian_R170 calculations I just focused on the 4.95 and 4.995 numbers because I am supposing we don’t know if Airbnb uses two decimals or three.
In my situation, I know that 4.95 is not Airbnb’s benchmark because my current average is 4.9538, which Airbnb shows as 4.95.
So I used 4.96 as the benchmark and you can see above that I need 10 more reviews at 5 to reach an average of 4.96, which rounds to 5.0.
If 4.995 is the benchmark, the same math shows that I would need just 535 (!) more consecutive reviews at 5 to reach a 5.0 overall average.
So, it’s possible but as @muddy points out ‘pretty much impossible’ IF Airbnb uses 4.995 (don’t know why they would use that number).
Let’s hope that we get ‘5’ on our next 10 reviews and then we’ll know how many decimal places that Airbnb uses.
Well, what you would have thought is unfortunately wrong. There is nothing for you to “wait and see”. The rating on your listing is most definitely not an amalgam of the category ratings. We aren’t guessing that this is true, it is true.
20 reviews gives the possibility of 100 stars overall, not 600.
And it isn’t pulled out of thin air- it’s a separate rating the guest leaves. They might leave 5 stars in every category but a 4* Overall rating for various reasons- something that made their stay less than ideal that isn’t covered by the other category ratings, or just fickleness.
Why bother posting if you didn’t want to be given accurate information?
Accurate information’s ok, different viewpoints are ok.
I posted because I thought it would be helpful, not to have an argument. I’ll keep an eye on my stats and see whether it turns out true or not and I’ll let you know towards the end of the summer but in the meantime if you all think it’s a waste of time just ignore it because if you’re all right then my workings are all wrong.
It isn’t a matter of opinion or different points of view, jujuba. It’s the indisputable fact of how the ratings are calculated, and yes, your workings are absolutely incorrect.
Well, what you would have thought is unfortunately wrong. There is nothing for you to “wait and see”. The rating on your listing is most definitely not an amalgam of the category ratings. We aren’t guessing that this is true, it is true.
I’m probably missing something here and maybe it’s just a fluke but when I enter my 109 stays and 4 lost stars into the spread the answer comes out as 4.99 for the overall rating - which is remarkably similar to our rating of 4.99
We’ve learned that the overall score is the one averaged to calculate that on number that shows up by the Host’s name.
Inexplicably, Airbnb in its description refers to that as the ‘primary’ score. So I certainly understand why some folks are confused by Airbnb’s imprecise language; they nowhere define ‘primary.’ So of course you’re right on this. I understand why @jujuba doesn’t find this intuitive; neither did I when I first ran across this.
Well, I appreciate that and thanks. Just out of interest did you try putting your own stays and stars into the sheet or are you managing to maintain 5’s across the board?
What is the purpose of discussing different viewpoints when one view is simply wrong? Is there value in seeing a person who refuses to admit error stubbornly dig in despite clear evidence?
It doesn’t seem the post is helpful at all; only wasting the time of folks who mistakenly enter the information into the spreadsheet without reading the entire thread.
