I would have liked to see something in the review about their poor communication, not sure why you didn’t mention that. A guest who can’t be bothered to respond to any of 4 messages isn’t someone I’d want to host. It would be more important to me than the fact that they were loud. You say you gave them good marks, but I’d say they deserved a 2 or 3* for communication.
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You make a good point! I struggle with being too critical on the communication front because I do understand that a lot of inexperienced Airbnb guests unknowingly don’t have their notifications turned on in the app and often mistakenly miss messages from the host. I do imagine that this was most likely the case for this guest.
Me, personally being an extremely detailed communicator, would have probably apologized for the oversight and acknowledged the reason for my lack of response, but I can also understand why someone would’t think that is necessary in this situation. After all, we do advertise our space as a self-check in, hands-off experience. In the event I absolutely needed to get in touch with the guest I would have called or texted her asking her to check her Air account, but there wasn’t a need for that in this situation.
I mentioned above that the lack of her messaging me back was a small annoyance to me in and of itself, but grouped with the noise, trash, and icy glares we got from the guests when waving to them as we pulled up in our driveway, it all amounted to a not-bad-but-also-not-great experience for us.
My objective has been to rate guests honestly and fairly while providing helpful and accurate information for other hosts. I’ve been struggling with this a bit though because I don’t want to be a host also known for being highly critical and negative of each and every guest. For me, the biggest issue I had with the guest was the noise so that’s what I chose to focus on in her written review. I didn’t want to totally pick their every move apart if that makes sense. I did knock off a star for communication, but again that’s a tough one as we advertise our space as a self check-in with little to no host interaction.
I think reviewing guests is the hardest part of this for me! It’s hard for me not to hold others to the expectations of how I would personally handle a situation. I also think I have a bit of emotional bias as we are hosting the Airbnb in our first home and I struggle to not take personally what I consider any lack of respect for our space (I know, I have GOT to let that one go haha).
I appreciate your insight and value hearing what is important to other hosts. It really does help me!