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I had an issue with one guest recently and I thought I should seek for your opinion.
I am a Superhost and have one listing that can fit up to 4 people. This particular guest sent an inquiry asking if I could accommodate 4 plus one 5 year old kid. I agreed and she made a booking. After a while she came back with rather confusing message asking to change her dates and also mentioning that another 2 persons would be coming. I assumed (wrongly) that these 2 persons would come as visitors and asked her if she would like to make amendments to her booking. She said nevermind, leave it as it is. On the day of her check in she came with 7 persons in total. I said to her that it is impossible to host her and that she would have to cancel the reservation in order to get a partial refund according to moderate cancellation policy. She refused and escalated the case to the Airbnb team saying that she had informed me about these extra guests.
Be it as it may, clearly there was a misunderstanding. The case got resolved with Airbnb shortly after. The problem is that my script sent an automated review although I had cancelled it previously (or so I thought I did). The guest left a worse possible review, affecting my ratings and consequently and probably my Superhost status. I called Airbnb explaining the situation, asking to delete her review as the guest did not actually stay at the apartment so how could she leave an objective review on accuracy, cleanliness, value, etc without even stepping in the apartment.
The Airbnb rep sided with the guest saying that I should have called them on the day of the check in to find a solution and that they understand the distress of a guest that went through. Therefore, according the Airbnb, the guest’s review was true and will not be deleted.
After months of working on nothing but stellar reviews and accommodating wishes of every single guest I got penalized heavily. While I understand guest’s point of view and take it as a misunderstanding I cannot understand Airbnb’s rep decision on this.
Did anyone experience something similar and is there anything that can be done in such case?
This doesn’t make sense from BNB’s prospective. They state quite clearly on their site that if a guest doesn’t stay they can’t leave a review.
From what you have said the guest didn’t use your property or stay their at all.
I would contact BNB again and see if you can get the review lifted
One area I do agree with BNB on, is that when you knew there was a problem at check in, it would have been better for you to have contacted them, rather than leaving it to the guest to escalate. This would have given you more control over the situation and share your side with BNB first.
If they won’t remove the review then I would reply to it and calmly state that the guest did not enter or stay at the apartment and therefore the review is inaccurate.
Keep calling and escalating. I had something similar regarding reviews, in that my review of the guest was removed on a technicality and that the guest exaggerated in her review as retaliation for not getting more of a refund, but I could not prove this. I posted on their Twitter and it caused a second look case to be opened. In the end, they reinstated my review of the guest, which was a better compromise than nothing.
If the guest never stayed they absolutely positively cannot leave a review.
Try calling a North American AirBnb representative, not a South/Central American one. I’ve noticed that some of the Eur/Asian and Latin/Caribbean Customer Service people are much less than helpful, and are only capable of following a script – like many companies’ “off-shore” CS efforts.
If you do not get satisfaction, continue to ask for the person’s supervisor, or ask to speak to someone in North America.
This review represents the writers personal experience so even though it was angry it’s still their experience so airbnb won’t remove it.
The best way to avoid reviews is to have a cancellation. It sounded like the guests reservation was cancelled… IN this case I thought you couldn’t leave a review.
It’s possible that they wouldn’t have said anything but for your review of them. They likely assumed you were mad and said something terrible so they wanted to get back at you.
One of the downsides of automated reviews. I don’t object to automated communication for the most part, but automated reviews never made sense to me.
Yes, we all got to the point where 99% of our reviews are basically identical, however, it’s not that difficult or time consuming to copy and paste your standard review when needed. and the consequences of automated reviews are bad… especially when you’ve left a good review for a guest another host would prefer not have to deal with.
Thank you Keith for your clarification. The guest did not cancel the reservation. And I didn’t want to cancel it as well as I’d get penalized as a host, if I am not mistaken.
According to the Airbnb Content Policy it says that Airbnb can remove a content in case of
…In addition to the above, the following guidelines apply to specific types of content on Airbnb:
Listings and profiles: Content that is fraudulent, false, misleading, or deceptive
Reviews:
Reviews that do not represent the author’s personal experience or that of their travel companions
The last sentence is pertaining my case. The guest did not stay at the unit. Therefore, how can she/he give comment or give feedback on the issue of accuracy, cleanliness, location, and value? I don’t mind her review explaining what happened. But in no case she should be entitled to give feedback on above topics if the person did not actually stayed in the apartment.
How does host remove revenge false reviews ? I have the same issue I had a guest cancelled on the day of check in itself and left a scathing completely false 1 star review when she didn’t even stay, she went there to cancel, she demanded but couldn’t get money from me direct, plus we had a strict cancellation policy (we weren’t even paid yet from Airbnb) please let me know what you guys said on Twitter to have false reviews removed?
At that point few months ago I was completely new to Airbnb 1 month in, we were doing well we had few 2? reviews of 5 stars then her 1 star rating basically shut us down I had a lot 20? then to now no bookings whatsoever, my listing fell to 4.0 from 5 for her 1 star horrible outlandish loony lies she said of my listing for example : puke everywhere )??) homeless approached her (??) no one approached her and there’s no puke, she even said to me we stink our building stinks our whole neighborhood stink etcs I felt her vileness had some racist element to it, my listing was completely ruined but support won’t even remove it they couldn’t care less, they exhausted me for 3 weeks with their runaround this guest harassed us to the point pint we had support blocked her yet support still finds her lies “relevant”
In the end I found out she was able to get a full refund because I left potatoes, legumes in the fridge for guest use. Don’t ask me why.
Recently I had a 2 star from a loony guest who was fixing to get a refund or money from her non stop irrelevant complaining about for example spare linens, seeing a raccoon in the yard claiming she felt “unsafe” from a raccoon (??) with her scary looking 60 lb pit bull by her side she described as a 15lb small dog she didn’t even mention any pet in her reservation, she bypassed our 99$ pet fee stating no pet on reservation she retaliated since I asked het about her pet and this time I didn’t even ask support for the removal seeing how we were treated for the 1st false one.
I’m ready to quit Airbnb for their injustice anyway we are ruined. Twitter might be our last resort
