Guest Star Ratings

I’ve noticed that some of my guests have an overall Star rating from host reviews, and others just have review comments; there doesn’t seem to be any obvious pattern in terms of whether it was for a past guest of mine or an upcoming booking nor whether they have only had 2 reviews or 20. Has anyone else noticed this … am just curious as I recently had a guest who didn’t have any reviews at the time he booked - they left the place in a huge mess, and I reviewed accordingly. Since booking he’s had a few reviews from other hosts (some before me & some after) as he’s clearly on a trip round Australia … for some reason only host comments are displayed, and not a star rating. I’m just curious to see his overall rating from all hosts … the comments reflect the experience I had so would imagine a 2-3 & if he’d not been a newbie & I’d seen this before booking I would have declined!

I’m not seeing them now and haven’t noticed them lately. Since it’s something that benefits hosts they probably did away with it.

One thing some of us did and which I wish more people would do is include the star rating in the review. I’ll say “5 stars!” in my review. Or 4/5 stars for cleanliness (or would if I had a 4 star guest) .

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I see ratings and reviews.

I see ratings and reviews as well; however, they have disappeared for me for awhile and then come back at least twice in the last year.

Same, @Helsi. I see ratings and reviews, even for past guests, in the panel at the side of that guest’s message thread in the inbox. Not the first set of stars, which is the listing’s rating, but below that. The one I am looking at right now says
:star: 5.0 avg rating :black_small_square: 3 reviews
followed by “Verified”, when the guest joined Airbnb, and where they live.
When you click on the avg rating, you get a popup with the breakdown.
I just checked, and past guests that were new and have only my review have that one review showing now in the panel, along with the star rating I gave them. Again, the breakdown shows up in the pop-up.
I am working from a laptop, @Robina.

I see it now, I swear I didn’t see it earlier this morning. However, it’s probably just me.

I see the ratings for some ie the overall rating for the guest from all hosts with individual review comments by host below, but for others only the review with no rating. It’s definitely inconsistent across guests, and only thing I can think of is that Airbn’b stopped including the hosts score for guests, so all the ratings that are displayed relate to older reviews & don’t include more recent ones. And any guest who joined recently, since the change doesn’t have any rating. I guess the only way to be sure would be to ask the question of Airbn’b but I probably won’t bother. As someone commented, Airbn’b have a tendency to favour guests, and perhaps they got a lot of complaints from guests objecting to low ratings making it hard to secure accommodation, so they stopped publishing them. Wouldn’t surprise me, though only a guess!

This one is hard for me because you learn “DRY” (Don’t Repeat Yourself) in software engineering. E.g. You don’t keep multiple copies of the same data or have multiple pieces of software that do the same thing, because it always leads to inconsistencies. Adding the star rating to the review comments to work around Airbnb’s software inconsistencies makes me cringe. :confounded:

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I’m also a software engineer like Brian but DRY here doesn’t bother me at all. Rather is that someone star system might be different than someone else’s star system (hence DRY can’t be applied).

Most of the time, if a guest did something wrong I’d spell that out so that future host will judge by themselves. The fact that guest left the lights and ceiling fans on in the entire house (including the basement), plus someone in his party ruined a white towel erasing makeup although black makeup towelettes were provided and slept on bare pillows, although there were pillow covers available tells you more than 4* for cleanliness, 4* total, right? Plus someone else would have given 3* for cleanliness or something.

I’m not just doing it for that reason. I think (but please comment if you think I’m off base, I can stop doing it if it’s not helpful) that it helps reinforce the idea to people reading reviews that 5 stars is the standard for good and anything less isn’t good enough. I’m not interested in having a message or handout that “educates” people on how the stars work, But I do think the mention of great guest = 5 stars is helpful.

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Oh, maybe I misunderstood, I thought you were saying that you included the star rating in the review comment because the actual stars given may or may not be visible to the person reading the comment. If the stars are visible right next to the comment, then putting it in the comment is redundant. If Airbnb always showed the stars for each review (instead of showing on the average for all reviews or not showing stars at all), then putting it in the comments seems unnecessary.

Excellent idea! Thanks! I will implement this going forward. Sadly, guests can create new accounts if they get booted or too many bad reviews, but at least it will help identify the “problem children” for a little while.

Well, so can hosts so at least it’s fair in that respect.