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This paper is a 2-year-old university research project that uses 3-to-4-year-old data. My apologies if this has been posted before but I never saw it before. It’s not light reading and it’s nerdy, but it’s refreshing to find a study of Airbnb data without an Airbnb agenda, but that unfortunately means it doesn’t contain the most useful information for those that do have an Airbnb agenda (such as Airbnb hosts).
I found the topic of survivorship bias to be the most interesting in the paper. The last paragraph of section 2 has some specific conclusions, some of which hosts have theorized before, such as “previous performance predicts future performance to an unjustifiable degree.” Which helps explain why a new host receiving a low rating may go out of business, or conversely, why hosts may continue to get high scores they don’t deserve.
Wow, very interesting read - not that I’ll finish reading it , but was blown away by this:
"The literature on Airbnb reports highly skewed distributions of rating scores, where the great majority of ratings is equal to or higher than 4.5 stars "
Apparently everybody like to be special , super host badge / 5 star rating makes
us proud in what we do and evokes a sense of loyalty to the brand - Airbnb.
We’re less likely to leave a platform that gave us such an honor .
And so it is that all of us are either super hosts or have 4.9 rating .
I sort of agree. I am proud of consistently being a SH with a 5.0 rating. But I wouldn’t say I’m particularly loyal to Airbnb. If there were another STR company that appealed to me, and if my husband and I were currently hosting, I would certainly list with another brand. Probably in addition to Airbnb. But maybe eventually instead, if the other brand were appealing enough. I think my loyalty to Airbnb is limited by Airbnb’s treatment of hosts—which is far less than stellar.
That’s exactly where I’m at. No viable platforms currently for private room listings other than Airbnb, unfortunately. I’ve actually never had any horrible experiences with them myself, but I abhor how they regard and treat and speak to hosts in general. So I’d be quite happy to sig up with another platform if there was one.
I’ve had the Superhost status from as soon as it was possible after I started hosting, I think after the first quarter. But I can’t say I’m “proud” of it, because I came to realize it’s just a carrot Airbnb dangles to keep hosts stressed out trying to maintain it and overlooking all sorts of bad behavior from guests (not mine, I get great guests, but I empathize with hosts who don’t). And when some nasty, crazy guest can tank a host’s rating, ad Airbnb refuses to remove it, even though it’s obviously an untrue outlier, causing them to lose Superhost status, the whole thing just becomes a farce. It’s not a reward for great hosting, it’s a behavior modification tool.
The funny thing is, when I first started hosting, I had no knowledge of the existence of Superhost, so it wasn’t anything I strived for. I wasn’t aware of hosting forums, I just started hosting in the way that came naturally to me, happened to get lovely guests who left 5* ratings, and one day, I got that “Congratulations, you’re a Superhost!” email. And I still had no idea what it meant or why I got it.
They remove listings with low ratings, so am not surprised at this.
I have seen ratings as low as 4.1, but only briefly before the listing was gone off of the website. I’m surprised to hear that there are a significant amount of 4.5 rated listings as that is quite low. However, I think, depending on the specific market (saturation, etc), that they give some listings a chance to bring up their rating for awhile. I have seen this in my market. A listing will go down, even to 4.3 or so, and it will hang out for awhile but either eventually goes up or is gone.
That’s been our experience, too. We’ve been supported by Airbnb on the very few times we’ve needed it, but I’ve read about so many other hosts’ rotten experience from Airbnb “support."
Just like they say about democracy - it’s a lousy system but all other systems are far worse…
Exactly ! and what a sharp tool it is : all hosts are good or very good create a positive atmosphere for potential guests , and hosts that are slow to get there are at the bottom
of the search anyway.
That’s not really true. There are listings with 2.5 ratings on the first page of search in some areas, believe it or not. I think the ones they don’t remove are ones from big property management companies who bring Airbnb lots of revenue. Because it’s all about their profits, not standards. It’s the little guys who get warned and removed for low ratings.
I’ve never seen any evidence that is true and I’m more inclined to believe that when a host with many listings gets a warning on a specific listing’s rating, the host simply deletes the listing and creates a new one.
As @JJD said, it’s region-specific (i.e. higher demand in an area is likely to make Airbnb more lenient on minimum ratings), but there’s also the case where Airbnb puts a listing on probation and it will still be around for some time before it’s removed. These would explain simply seeing low-rated listings on occasion. Of course, if you se the same low-rated listings over a long period of time, that could be a whole different story.
Airbnb would be open to an antitrust suit if they actually did remove listings with low ratings from 1-2 listing owner-hosts but let listings with the same ratings continue for mega property-manager hosts. If there is real evidence that they are doing this, then it should be made public.
