There are many things Air does that is unfair, if not capricious: EC, agents ignoring policies, damages, allowing guests to break rules and trash a review, suspending hosts, etc. That list goes on.
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I worry about things that affect our business, ratings, occupancy, bookings, revenue, and profit. I can understand why a few people might get tiffed over this but no one should lose any sleep over it.
What I think Airbnb should do is eliminate Superhost altogether, or have the criteria such that it actually reflects only the quality of one’s hosting. Which it will never do if number of bookings or nights hosted, or overall rating, is a criteria, if they refuse to remove obvious outlier and retaliatory reviews.
There’s a host in London who posts on the CC. She has a big beautiful old house and rents out several rooms. She has held Superhost for 5 years and has never fallen below a 4.9 rating. She just had a guest, who had zero complaints during her stay and seemed pleased and friendly, leave a nice written review, but 3 stars in all categories. This host will now lose her Superhost status because she does mostly long term bookings and won’t be able to pull that rating up, which is now at 4.3, because of that one 3 star review, by the January assessment.
Do you really think she deserves that? Do you think she just suddenly fell down on the job and became a worse host who deserved that 3 star rating? And the only reason she can think of that the guest left that low rating, was because the guest asked if she could have her boyfriend stay for a few nights and the host said sure, as stated in her listing, it would be a $15 charge for an extra guest.
Using stats like response rate, no cancellations, are things over which a host has control. It’s unfair to portray Superhost as actually refecting experienced, superior hosting, when there are criteria involved over which the host has no control.
But we all know that Superhost isn’t about great hosting. It’s about keeping hosts stressed out trying to achieve or retain it. Like most of Airbnb’s ways, it’s smoke and mirrors.
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Thank you, Annet. I actually really miss hosting. I got really cool guests.
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@JJD Thank you for the empathy.
I have had experienced guests say, just like some hosts do, that they do try to book with Superhosts, as they know they have little chance of being cancelled on. So that is one advantage of Superhost. If it attracts seasoned guests, that’s kind of a plus for me.
Thank you. That is a thoughtful, well-conceived and interesting response.
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I would say there are many things Air can do better. I agree that they should remove outlier and retaliatory reviews.
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RE: London host, we would not do LTR with any OTA. I only have what you wrote and view the guest as a tenant or lodger who should be able to have her BF over, at no cost. The host chose to risk their long-term relationship, pennies over pounds. IMO, a poor decision. Fair? The host made a decision and risked causing friction with a paying customer. There were consequences and now she is unhappy about it. This is a learning opportunity.
She’s been doing the long term bookings for a long time and they’ve mostly worked out well for her. Competition in London is fierce. I don’t know why she doesn’t rent direct, I think she does sometimes.
Re charging extra for her renter’s overnight amours, she’s had lots of these requests, and if she didn’t charge for them, she’d have to up her nightly fees, which she of course doesn’t want to have to do. So that’s her rule, just as other hosts have rules they stick to.
When a guest gets a good deal, because it’s at least a month’s booking, they shouldn’t expect to have their boyfriend stay, too, taking hot showers, dirtying towels, etc. for free. It’s one thing to let an extra guest stay for free for a night or two in a fairly pricey listing, for a short term booking, but if she let all these female guests have their boyfriends stay whenever they wanted, not even covering the extra costs, well, that’s just not viable.
The idea that hosts need to kowtow to guest’s requests and demands in order not to risk a bad review, is yet another thing wrong with the whole review system. For a guest to mark down because a host simply reiterated and stuck to their stated policies is not okay.
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Yes, the recommendations keep changing and it’s different in different countries. It also is dependent on when the vaccines are made available. My 90 year old stepmom in the UK had her first last Dec. and wasn’t offered her second until April. But she’s recently gotten her booster.
As with most things, different people can have different levels of immunity, with the same number of vaccines or no vaccines. I happen to luckily have a really strong immune system in general. I’ve never gotten a flu vaccine, for instance, I’m 72 years old, and I haven’t had the flu in 25 years. I never get colds, either.
Certainly doesn’t lead me to think I’d be immune from Covid, that would be idiotic, but there have always been people who somehow didn’t get sick from raging contagious diseases, even before the advent of modern medicine- if not, there wouldn’t be any humans left.
We have different opinions on it. The host created a conflict over pennies, with a lodger/tenant (not guest) who was staying at least a month, using AIR as the platform?
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IMO, that is a darn poor business decision. She needs to pick her battles more wisely, and honestly should have known better 5 years into this.
Perhaps you can afford to give things away that others can’t and what seems like pennies to you may not to others.
Every host runs their business in the way they see fit. Bending one’s rules just to try to make sure you get a 5* review may be what others consider a poor business decision.
And as far as this host and her guest, to be clear, she didn’t create a “conflict”. When she reminded the guest of the extra charge, the guest said okay. As a home share host, she had many pleasant conversations with the guest, and they were laughing about stuff together. That’s why the host was shocked- there were no signs that the guest was upset about anything.
The host only looked back to think what possible reason the guest had for leaving a 3* review, and that was about the only thing she could think of. There were also some possible communication problems, as the guest wasn’t at all fluent in English. And the 3 stars may not have had anything at all to do with the guest’s stay, as she left a positive written review. It could have just been one those cases of the guest not understanding the rating system, and thinking because it was “as expected” a 3 stars was appropriate. Or one of those “you never leave 5*s because nothing is ever perfect” personal or cultural things.
Just FYI-ing. The review ratings don’t say anything about expectations anymore. They now say “Great”, “Good”, “Okay”, “Bad” and “Terrible”. So “Okay” is the new “as expected” I suppose. But it does seem more easily understood otherwise.
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The guest review forms seem to change fairly often, and I’ve read several versions. I was aware that the “as expected” isn’t attached to the star ratings, but I think it still appears somewhere? Or you aren’t asked that at all anymore? The last version I read, that was posted by a host who was also a guest, had that “expectations” question as the first thing, rating came much later in the form, after other questions.
But I always had a sense that psychologically, if there are 5 levels to choose from in the expectations question, and 5 stars to choose from, guests might conflate them.
I posted not long ago with the screen shots from the review (for a stay I didn’t get to travel to) and there were a lot of survey questions after the rating. This time there were fewer survey questions and the ones that bothered some hosts here about wifi and kitchen were gone. They were more general and then asked for clarification, for example “cleanliness”, I ticked off “stains”, “dirty dishes”, “dirty bathroom”, “mold” and some other stuff that clarified the cleanliness issues. I wonder if I had less survey questions because of the lower ratings I gave, not sure.
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Not if your rental is only active in the summer. That’s hardly fair by April 1! By July 1 maybe. Our season here is May to mid-september. I have had less than a dozen out of season guests since I opened 4 years ago.
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One thing they are not doing with superhosts is give them the $100 credit. When I made my full years of superhost assessment they said sorry that doesn’t include the coupon. So we lost the old coupons because we wouldn’t travel with the pandemic and now they are pretending that superheats shouldn’t get the coupon. I had a long debate with a CS rep but eventually gave up trying to prove my Pont.
I guess I’ll be losing mine.
I tend to get longer stays, which suits me quite well, because I don’t have much flexibility in cleaning days. Most of my guests stay at least a month. So I have plenty of ‘nights’, but not so many ‘stays’.
What is going to kill me is my cancellation rate. I have exactly one cancellation, but that comes to almost 10%.
I guess I could hustle a bit more and reduce my max stay in order to bring that percentage down, but I’m happy with the way my business fits my life right now. That is more important to me than a Superhost badge.
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I will probably be one to lose my status, partly because many of my nights this year were booked through other channels and I went from 3 rooms to 1. Some say it doesn’t matter. We’ll see next Spring.
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So they are favoring hosts who do frequent short stays. They already reduced the number of stays required once, maybe they will do it again.
I want you to be healthy. We all want everyone on this forum to be healthy and I accept vaccinated guests and several have shown me their cards and ID at the door.
It’s been so long since your first shot, just find one close to you and go get them/start over. Then open to vaccinated guests.
I share living spaces with guests and got my second vaccination shot at the end of March. I opened in April to vaccinated guests and with the first line of my listing “Host is Vaccinated, follows Covid cleaning rules.”
Yes, my choice to open - guests are thoughtfully arriving wearing masks and social distancing. I allow limited kitchen use and have disinfecting wipes everywhere. I’ve only had one set of guests lie about being vaccinated and she left me 4 stars for accuracy over something I fixed the minute she said something. I ticked the “would not host again” button due to her maintenance level and disregard for my rules about vaccination. BTW, once I knew they weren’t vaccinated, I wore a mask and disinfected everything all the time.
You’re fretting because you’ll lose SH in April, but you have tons of positive reviews and when you decide to open, you’ll get SH back very quickly.
Agreed. air is a booking platform trying to manage the needs of an astounding number of hosts and guests - @Jefferson thanks for those numbers.
This was my next thought - Air started as a home share platform, which was the reason I started with Air and booked a flat in Paris with a delightful host in 2012. I wanted the local experience and not some dreary hotel filled with holiday tour people.
@muddy since you’re not hosting and this is near and dear to not only your heart but other home share hosts, why don’t you start this grass roots movement?
It IS a personal choice, seriously. Plus:
With all due respect, you seem to be a go-getter when you really want something. Get the 2nd shot. Get a different 2nd shot since you’re almost at 6 months and shot #2 is supposed to be within 3 months. Get the J&J and open. Concerned about mixing up the shots by going from Pfizer to Moderna or J&J? Medical experts are actually recommending that course of action, at least here in the states. My business partner got Moderna early on because that was what was on offer in CA. I was able to get Pfizer and he got Pfizer as his booster. I’ll get whatever they give me for a booster, just so long as I can stay healthy and strong.
I just got a coupon. Weird. Air is so capricious.
It seems clear that Air is moving away from their roots and moving towards a more hotel-like, single home/condo/flat platform. Which is a shame. They just don’t seem to take shared home or truly seasonal listings into account.
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I was pretty sure I was correct in my reading of the rules but was not successful in getting the CS reps to agree. I did escalate it. Very frustrating.
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Even as an “Entire House” listing the environment feels sadly different.
In my few of years I’ve seen a huge influx of “professionally managed” listings. I was recently solicited by one. 
I take every stay personally. I like to connect w/ my guests when possible. I can tell the ones who viewed the stay like some hotel vs my home. Even if they do okay I don’t prefer them.
I know this is a business but y’all know what I mean. It’s like going to a small locally owned bakery where the owner/baker is behind the counter vs some national chain. It’s just different.
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