> Chesky figured that Airbnb’s experience in attractively displaying homes, vetting hosts, and responding to crises could make it more trustworthy than competitors and therefore the go-to option for virtually anything.
Online reviews are totally broken. I recently spent a week at an Airbnb in the Gold Coast, Australia. The property was rated 5* but was tired and worn. The photos must have been 5 years old before a soul set foot in the place.
I rated it 3*. Shortly after, I got a phone call from the owner. He had my number because I'd had to call him because one of the two toilets in a five-bedroom 14-guest 'villa' was blocked. As in, overflowing with fecal matter blocked.
He essentially tried to bribe me to raise my review. I refused. The house is currently listed as 4.9* with those same photos. A preposterous exaggeration of its quality.
I too had similar experience. I booked a 4.9 rated property with 30 reviews. But experience was really poor and I rated 1 stars post checkout. The propery owner reachout to me asking for explanation but I wasn’t in any mood to discuss.
Hours later they filed fake complaint to Airbnb that I rated poorly as I wanted late checkout and asked money to remove review. Airbnb removed my review post that.
I had a flight to catch so I couldn’t checkout late anyway. I shared even flight details with Airbnb but they didn’t reinstate review and added a strike to my account.
I expect host did this previously as well to improve their rating.
Had a similar experience where a Sydney AirBnB listed their property as air-conditioned. Had a misting fan. That doesn't quite cut it as "air conditioning" in 45C weather. Had the same outcome as you. Ended up doing a chargeback on my card and got banned from the platform.
Yes, I had a similar experience. Reviews on Airbnb can't be trusted because most hosts are experts at having bad reviews removed. But if reviews can't be trusted then the whole thing is worthless.
I've become a lot more jaded about online reviews over the years.
I had an Amazon review removed because apparently mentioning that a competing product is more effective goes against their TOS.
I had a WordPress plugin review removed because apparently a critical vulnerability that got our site hacked isn't a valid reason to give it one star.
I had a local BBQ chain offer to give me a free bottle of sauce if I let them watch me give them a 5-star rating on Google.
I've seen tons of video game and app websites apply "anti review-bombing" measures to factor out thousands of low ratings for being supposedly off-topic, often for major games that they're financially affiliated with through sales or advertising.
And that's just for third-party websites. If a company's website has customer ratings/reviews for their own products, then the conflict of interest is too great to even pretend that they might be legitimate.
Oh absolutely. This makes leaving bad reviews even more important.
- leave unemotional matter-of-fact reviews so they can't complain for slander
- leave them days later so they can't link them to you
- leave them for businesses that provide incentives for 5-star reviews
- leave them when multiple reviews already complain about unethical actions taken by the owner
A 4-star HIG hotel in Bangkok once proposed I leave a good review to fix one of their mistakes. I firmly said I wouldn't and then mentioned the request in my 2-star review. The mistake was assigning "free breakfast" to the wrong room in a 2-room booking. Had to fight 3 days to get it fixed.
The problems you mention are real; but on average it seems Google Maps review are fair; in my experience they tend to reflect the reality better.
I think it would be interesting to be able to see an Airbnb place directly on Google maps (via a direct link), to compare reviews there; I'm working on a simple Tampermonkey script to do just that, will post it when ready.
Ye reviews doesn't work when the reviewed know who reviews and what they say.
It is technically possible to add a delay or whatever such that the land lord doesn't know who gave the review.
And there are social problems too. It is like you never give anyone anything but 5/5 if some app make you rate someone, unless maybe the worker try to murder you. A 4 is a 1.
But I think landlords are in a way better position vs AirBnB than gig workers are versus their employers.
At least he was apologetic about the shitty toilet.
The last time I ever directly gave Airbnb money the host accused my female work colleague of blocking the toilet with menstrual products and charged us 400CAD for a plumber to "fix" it. My colleague was incensed -- she angrily stated that the chronology was wrong, demonstrated that no aforesaid items were in her possession, but the host didn't believe it. We ended up with my card being billed before claiming successfully on travel insurance. I can't believe that happened in Toronto -- Canada is one of the nicest places on the planet -- but (US) Airbnb support took the hosts side instantly and wouldn't budge. We had a shitty toilet for a week!
The last time I stayed in one was in a urine soaked crash pad with cardboard covering the broken windows in Montréal. We spent five hours there around the unsafe electrical unit before they did actually sort something else out. The host didn't reply to emails and it later turned out had been arrested, explaining both his silence and the less than salubrious people we'd previously been sharing with.
I deleted my account and refuse to go in airbnbs now. Booking.com is far from brilliant but at least it's scatologically free so far...
You're lucky. I had a real bad experience and the host managed to get Airbnb delete my review, I think the reason was something like host interactions were not relevant to the review? It was completely ridiculous.
This reminds me of the time Amazon deleted my review about being sent expired products because the review wasn't about the product. It made me very dubious of the veracity of other reviews.
What I’ve learned (the hard way) is that you just get what you pay for. If an Airbnb is $100 and all the hotels in the area are $200, no matter what the photos look like and how good the reviews are, it will be terrible. Most people review at the end of their trip, when the disappointment of getting a crappy place is starting to fade, and tend to rate cheap places better than they really deserve.
This is a general problem. These things worked before those platforms became successful enough to warrant a cottage industry around them. Nowadays there are "reputation management" companies specializing in getting bad reviews deleted by any means and shady businesses will actively bribe or shame customers into giving them perfect scores. For a while everyone knew that 5 star and 1 star ratings are often fake and that you should check the ratings in between to get the real ones but nowadays those often don't exist or are just as fake (often left by shadier "reputation management" companies to score them an easy win if the business hires them).
What services like Airbnb would need would be direct partners actually testing the listings in person. But that costs money and requires hiring staff, which is antithetical to the business model of "gig economy" apps which exist in order to avoid the overhead of running a real company in that industry by instead offloading all the work to "gig workers" as independent contractors.
bribes or people just commenting "great" on avg or below avg offerings
If someone rents a place with scheduled roof repairs, not informing AirBnB or customer, they should be eternally banned. I couldn't even get a full refund.
I can't imagine actual hospitality places with a long tradition around Mediterranean to ever do something like that.
I feel like it's very similar with everything:
* suitcases without nice silent rubber wheels, even premium suitcases have loud plastic ones,
* airplanes are a chore, descending into madness over time,
* eternally inefficient software, becoming slower and slower on faster hardware,
* tiktok guitarists without skill showing off their montaged videos earning a living through popularity,
the majority is voting out quality and care out of everything.
This same thing can be said for Google Maps and many other platforms.
I effectively stopped using Airbnb, both due to prices that are approaching or more expensive than hotels, but also because of this shift of hosts to only caring about reviews and focusing on making a steady stream of new people checking in, without really doing any effort of making someone return. As long as the review scores are fine, all is good.
The original idea of Airbnb is long gone, and I experienced more than once someone writing on Airbnb, then another person sending a message with check in instructions. It is a business - nothing wrong with that in general, but it is disguised as people renting their spare rooms, which is rarely the case now.
They will happily oblige and put your review down if the host asks nicely. Happened to me, happened to my friends. Also they don’t care a bit about fake obvious reviews. Not like “not actively monitoring”, like telling you idk if you care to report it.
Strong cosign. Ratings and reviews should always be independent and beyond the control of that being reviewed. Reddit would be an amazing service if it supported commenting on any page/site/product/entity, but this is anathemic to advertising dollars.
Reddit at least used to have a form of value as a recommendations engine—searches for "best x site:reddit.com" would yield anything from decent to fantastic results depending on the product. But even that is completely useless nowadays due to bots and AI spam. Product recommendation services like Wirecutter have been ruined by Amazon affiliate links.
I have no idea who to trust on the quality of products in an era where the amount of choices available is overwhelming and the number of real human responses on the internet in any place where there's money to be made is dwindling by the day.
Online reviews are totally broken. I recently spent a week at an Airbnb in the Gold Coast, Australia. The property was rated 5* but was tired and worn. The photos must have been 5 years old before a soul set foot in the place.
I rated it 3*. Shortly after, I got a phone call from the owner. He had my number because I'd had to call him because one of the two toilets in a five-bedroom 14-guest 'villa' was blocked. As in, overflowing with fecal matter blocked.
He essentially tried to bribe me to raise my review. I refused. The house is currently listed as 4.9* with those same photos. A preposterous exaggeration of its quality.