Kind of upset over a 4 star rating---heard this one before?

Thank you for writing this. I had a good laugh.
I always remember my boss , the nicest Iranian guy who had no personality when it came to dealing with people. After each insident of encountering human stupidity he said: people are stupid, Yana, very stupid😂.

For the past 2 months I worked very hard with running singlehandedly 7 rooms . Sometimes my days were 16–18 hours . Most guests were good but some were piece of work.
One lady guest sent me 39 messages on my only night out about this and that and that.!She got me drunk that night I swear .
Money is my big incentive . I lost a lot of sensitivity about annoying people like that since I started hosting.
Also majority of my guests are amazing.
By the way you are not alone on “location” rating. We all get it more or less.

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There’s no standard pronunciation of the o vowel e.g. hot, or, move. I have no idea why the English chose to use the ou spelling in several words like favour because none of the root Latin languages do. However we English are always right anyway of course.

To tell the truth, I haven’t gone traveling using airbnb (yet), but before I found this forum, I would have been at risk for giving an unwarranted four stars. The way it stacks up in my head is like this:
1 star: horrible!
2 stars: bad
3 stars: meh
4 stars: pretty good
5 stars: transcendently amazing

Which means that in my head, four stars feels like a perfectly decent rating. But that’s not airbnb’s rating scale. Theirs goes like this:
1 star: sucks
2 stars: sucks
3 stars: sucks
4 stars: sucks
5 stars: acceptable

I can’t help feeling that my star system is a MUCH MORE FUNCTIONAL SYSTEM. The way they do it, it essentially turns the question into a binary choice, only with four different ways of saying “no” and only one way to say “yes.” It allows for no gradations of experience. With the airbnb system, I have no way to address a stay that WASN’T perfect for some reason–say the ceiling fan didn’t work and I was too hot–and say, “But, you know, great place, spotlessly clean, all in all not perfect but not bad either.” The “not perfect but not bad” has been totally removed from the equation.

I don’t like it. And I don’t think we should necessarily blame the guests for not understanding that airbnb was giving them a binary choice between “sucks” and “doesn’t suck.” I blame airbnb for having a rating system with no nuance.

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and they continue to promote it that way, without any effort to fix it, by requiring hosts to get 4.8 stars to maintain SH, “Collections” and “Plus” listings.

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Superhost was too easy to get. I haven’t made up my mind if the new standard will be too hard. What I think is unfair isn’t the SH rating, it’s expecting everyone to maintain 4.7.

And while I think the system is unfair in many ways, I also know people give more stars than they should at times.

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Well, the only thing that is standard is the pronunciation of the vowel itself; they say their name…well, sort of. :slight_smile:

And you are right! The British ARE always right! :))))

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This really irritates me! I have it in my house rules NOT TO LOG OUT OF NETFLIX OR HULU which I provide,. If folks want to access their queue they can do it on their own device or I even provide an HDMI cable if they want to stream. I also have it in the tv instructions which are laminated and placed right next to the remotes. But still, every so often, someone logs out. :frowning:

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I got four stars having given a £30 discount - my own fault, I reduced the price and made parking an add-on fee, instead of charging more money with free parking. I forgot to untick the free parking box, so the first guest had the reduced price and free parking. And gave me four stars. I quizzed her on it, my message is in the grey. You can see that as a guest, she feels 4 stars is very good. You have to read from the bottom up

Hee’s ignoring the fact English is a barsterd langwadge.
Perhaps we need a new world fascist to standardise the spelling for us? Might Donald Trump oblige if he gets a second term?

Donald Trump and spelling…lol. If you follow politics in the US you’ll notice that the Trumpsters have rejected the tyranny of grammar and spelling “rules” and they reject the elitist argument that education is important.

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We composed and framed these signs in all of our rentals in 5"x7" photo frames and also include it in our checkout email when we thank them and return their deposit. We had to leave it in the rental too because some guests review us before they check out (before they get our email with deposit refund):

…our checkout checklist reads:
IMPORTANT: A full rating of all 5 stars means you were generally satisfied overall with no major complaints. Each star docked indicates something wrong that negatively impacted your stay; for instance 4 stars indicates almost (but not completely) satisfied. Travel sites regularly demote property listings with too many ratings of 4 stars or less. Please refer to the “Vacation Rental Rating” guide posted near the entrance.

Did you?

It looks very similar to this one that @GutHend produced a few years ago:

JF

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Why yes, that is where we got it from but we revised it to be less tongue-in-cheek. But it serves the same basic purpose. I was assuming not everyone had seen that and personally I feel the way we worded it is better. That of course is for each to decide on their own.

LOL. Obviously @GutHend freely shared and now you are freely sharing what you think is your improved version. Thanks for that. But no, there is no need to cut and paste the same post into multiple threads. It it gets spammy it will get deleted.

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Great to see you got inspired by my sign, just like I was inspired by someone else on this forum :grin:. That is still the greatest thing here: There is never a one-size-fits-all solution, but we do fully inspire each other. Sometimes with practical solutions, sometimes by just making ourselves reflect.

If I can try to give you some feedback:

  • I think yours is too lengthy and people will never read it.
  • Take care with abbreviations: Not everyone will know that mgmt. is management.
  • ‘Owner, business and management’ are all words that create more distance than the word ‘host’. When people feel more distance, they will have less problems with leaving you a low score.
  • Consider that my tongue-in-cheek solves the very negative vibe of the 1 and 2 stars. While my 1 and 2 stars kind of sound funny (at least that was the intent), yours sounds just extremely negative. If I were to be unsatisfied, your guide would not prevent me to give you 1 or 2 stars. My guide gets the extremity of a 1 or 2 stars score better accross :thinking: … I think :crazy_face: … I kind of hope that my guide cuts down the scope from 1 - 5 to 3 - 5 :upside_down_face: … I might however be totally delusional :shushing_face:
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Uh yeah, as stated we reworded it and reformatted it. I was using the word “composed” loosely. Do you think that was some failed attempt to take credit for something that is such an amazing work of art like a literary composition? And as I stated in another post yesterday I thought it was helpful enough to post in three of the most popular or relevant threads about 4-star ratings so many could find and use it. I didn’t know he shared it here because that is not where I found it but you obviously seem to be accusing me of something.

You know, I honestly have to say it seems this forum is quite unfriendly. Twice now I tried to share something I found helpful and I was accused of spamming or being a schill. I had first posted a month ago about a site I found where you could post your listings with no fees to guest or host and no card processing and I was accused of working for them, which any quick Google search could see I do not. I have been on many forums for hosting for years and in the business since 2004 but never encountered one quite this unwelcoming. Perhaps it’s because it is run by private parties and not by an OTA like the others. To be honest not sure it’s worth it. There are plenty of other host forums (for each site and an official AirBnB one). This feels almost like a high school clique or something. If you want to “ban” me be my guest; no prob. :+1:

Lovely to see that my work of creativity has started living its own life ! :tada: :confetti_ball: :tada: :confetti_ball: :tada: :confetti_ball: :tada: Don’t worry about having been inspired by it. I’m very happy to see that it has served as an inspiration.

Now, please stop being defensive about everything else. It is true that we don’t like to see loads of repetition of the same thing in a short amount of time. It’s also true that we are generally weary of links to other websites and people ‘promoting’ things. (It’s against forum policies.) Now that you know these things, you are ready to contribute to this forum and be appreciated for it.

Welcome to the forum !

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While I did not say anything retaliatory, I’ll admit it is a bit hard not to feel defensive when you feel you are being attacked – twice now when I was honestly trying to help. Other sites’ hosts have welcomed info and shared experiences; even information about alternative sites. I didn’t think mentioning other sites was prohibited since this isn’t run by AirBnB. Guess this site has a learning curve that I’ll have to adjust to, but I won’t be offended if banned. All that matters to me is that I know what my intentions were (to be helpful and share info and ideas) but if that means people are going to jump on someone and assume the worst so be it. Not every forum is for everyone, I get that.

Only reason why I considered other forums is because the HomeAway one that I’ve been on since it’s inception in 2011 (and was for several months the #1 contributor out of 35,000 members based on “points” – which to be honest shouldn’t be so emphasized but whatever) has re-branded to VRBO in a very awkward, hard to navigate format that I don’t care for nor like using anymore. I have also joined the official AirBnB forum & TripAdvisor’s as well. So far no issues there.

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I appreciate the advice. I can see how it works for you. But so many forums assume everyone runs or operates just like them. We are an official business. We don’t operate as one person renting to another. We have multiple rentals in a gated resort community. Writing “put these hosts in jail” is just not professional to us and not reflective of an established business. Not so sure why that is hard to understand but I know from experience hosts often seem to assume everyone operates like they do. While we appreciated the website we found your chart on it needed to be revised for a professional business. If I had read yours I would have thought (oh, he’s being cute and folksy) and probably not seen it as a real serious issue. I never criticize what others need to do in their particular circumstances. A little understanding and tolerance goes a long way.