I had one who gave 4 overall but every category was tickef 5.
A fellow airbnb host got 3 stars overall and when she asked guests why 3 they said the weather was bad!
After 7 years I do not usually read reviews. There are enough details and random reviews only add to the difficulty of the job. I have over a thousand reviews and guests have been more than fair. I pray and tithe and work hard to cover every need. I also thank everyone for staying.
I’ve also been hosting for about 7 years, although I closed for almost two years because of Covid and shared kitchen, but because my bookings are seasonal (only have a viable 6 month season) and bookings tend to be for a week or two, I don’t have hundreds of reviews. So I do read all the reviews guests leave, but whereas I used to be really interested to right away see what they had written, I now often forget to check for several days. And I’ve always gotten 5 star reviews, so I’ve never had review anxiety.
I think it’s time that hosts, whom Airbnb would have no business without, approach Brian Chesky in writing & with a coordinated approach, make him fully aware of the amount of anxiety the review process is causing us.
Suggestions would be:
- ensure the average rating of ALL categories be used for host rating
- Do away with ‘overall’ rating, it is pointless
- Change the Superhost average to 4.5
The above would still make hosts do a good job & be so much fairer.
Someone from the US would be better to coordinate this I think. They are perhaps, the biggest market.
Teresa Brisbane, Australia
I can’t see them changing it at all.
The review system is the stick that Airbnb uses to beat a host into submission.
Why would they change such an excellent method of control…?
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Do you really think Chesky isn’t aware of Airbnb’s abysmal customer service, unaware that 5 star hosts get their listings instantly suspended just because some scammer guest reports a BS violation, that he isn’t aware of how stressed hosts get about reviews? Of course he knows all that. He couldn’t care less, and these things are done by conscious design.
Just like all the other dot com millennial billionnaires. They are adept at portraying themselves as people with some super social conscience, working to make the world a better place, virtue signaling, blah blah, looking like “regular guys”, in their skate shoes and jeans and casual attire, they even have calculated words and phrases used across all their businesses, like “the team” (watch interviews with Elizabeth Holmes before she got busted, when she was still pushing her bogus research and development to investors- “the team” is used extensively in her rhetoric) and they may once actually have had some noble vision, but just like generations of the uber-wealthy before them, now they’re really only interested in the money and the lifestyle it affords them.
2 Likes