"This home is in the Bottom 10% of Eligible listings." Seriously?

[Sudha33]

While everybody is talking about the Top 1/5/10% property highlights feature that was rolled out in the Summer 2024 release, nobody has raised a concern about the "Bottom 10%" label that was introduced along with it. Just like the "Top 1%" label, the logic for this "Bottom 10%" label is very subjective. There are no clear metrics that shows why a property has been categorized under it.

This label adds a negative tag to the property, which overrides the overall ratings and reviews that we have gathered over months/years. For example, a guest would be willing to consider a property with an average rating  of 4.7 with some good recent 5-star reviews. But once they see this label just above the reviews, they will definitely not book it. I mean who would want to stay in a Bottom 10% property, right? This will also take away the opportunity for hosts to improve our ratings in the future. No bookings means no new 5-star ratings.

I wonder what value AirBnB is gaining out of tagging their host's property with such negative labelling, even when the property has a good enough rating to be on their platform? If you want us to delist, just let us know.

Disclosure: We have been impacted by this Bottom 10% label and our conversion rate has gone down to 0%  (despite having 86% first-page search impressions and 9% search-to-listing conversions). And if you think you won't be impacted by it, remember it is just a matter of 1 biased negative review from a guest to override your overall rating and get you tagged as Bottom 10%!

[Sudha33]

Thank you @Zheng49 for the support. This becomes more interesting when listings with lower ratings than yours do not get this tag, but you do (It is happening to us). This becomes a very subjective thing, especially if the low rating is given by an over-demanding guest, for things beyond your control.

[Helen3]

Clearly I didn't say it was bad @Zheng49 I was trying to help @Sudha33 understand why he was in the bottom 10%

Airbnb sees 4.6 as poor ratings . If you look at his ratings he's being marked down for areas within his control such as cleanliness , check in and accuracy .

if you're in business (not in school) and you know some customers are unhappy with the service you provide. You look to address the issues causing unhappiness ie issues with cleanliness rather than ignoring them and continuing to attract negative feedback 

[Rebecca]

Hi @Sudha33 and others who have shared on this thread, 

We believe it’s important to provide guests with all of the information they need to decide whether a listing is right for them. To support Hosts who want to improve their listing quality, we’ve added more tips and education to our Resource Center as well as a quality webinar for eligible Hosts.

Quality isn’t just determined by a listing’s overall rating: There are many factors that we use to understand more about a guest’s stay, including subcategory ratings, Host cancellations and quality-related customer service issues. We use all of this information to determine where a listing sits on the quality scale of all listings across Airbnb. 

I hope this helps provide some clarity however, if you have any more questions please don't hesitate to ask. 

Rebecca 😊

[Sudha33]

Hello Rebecca, thank you for taking the time to address our concern. I have a few follow-up questions and hoping that you could answer them for the benefit of this community.

1. How far in the past do you review the parameters for to assign these Highlight labels? Is it 30/60/90 days or more?

2. Once a tag is assigned, how long does it stay for? Does it get removed automatically or only based on fulfilling some parameters? Can hosts get visibility to those specific parameters?

3. If hosts need to score a few 5-star ratings to get rid of the negative Bottom 10% label, how will that work, since we won't get any more bookings? (Check our conversion insights mentioned earlier). So while we appreciate AirBnB providing resources for hosts to improve the ratings, it won't make a difference.

4. Has AirBnB considered the potential misuse of this new feature? A competitor can have their friends/family stay for 1 night, leave a negative review for 1-2 parameters, without using any language that flags your community guidelines. Based on the recent low score, a Bottom 10% tag is assigned to the property, which overrides the overall rating. The hosts have no option to get the review removed.

PS: We have 0 host cancellations and 0 security/privacy issues reported by guests. So we're pretty sure this tag was assigned due to a recent negative review from 1 guest.

Thank you for your patience and time. It seems like we are stuck with this label without any clarity or way forward.

[Rebecca]

Hi @Sudha33 👋

Thanks for your patience whilst I got you some answers. 

1. How far in the past do you review the parameters for to assign these Highlight labels? Is it 30/60/90 days or more?

To qualify for a highlight, a listing must have received at least five reviews within the past two years.

2. Once a tag is assigned, how long does it stay for? Does it get removed automatically or only based on fulfilling some parameters? Can hosts get visibility to those specific parameters?

I'm still asking for clarification on this one, please bear with me and hopefully I'll have an answer soon. 

3. If hosts need to score a few 5-star ratings to get rid of the negative Bottom 10% label, how will that work, since we won't get any more bookings? (Check our conversion insights mentioned earlier). So while we appreciate AirBnB providing resources for hosts to improve the ratings, it won't make a difference.

As you have rightly said, to support Hosts who want to improve their listing quality, we’ve added more tips and education to our Resource Center as well as a quality webinar for eligible Hosts. We take several factors into consideration, including overall rating, subcategory ratings, Host cancellations, and quality-related customer service issues. We use this to daily evaluate all eligible listings on Airbnb and determine the top 1%, 5%, or 10% and bottom 10%. 

4. Has AirBnB considered the potential misuse of this new feature? A competitor can have their friends/family stay for 1 night, leave a negative review for 1-2 parameters, without using any language that flags your community guidelines. Based on the recent low score, a Bottom 10% tag is assigned to the property, which overrides the overall rating. The hosts have no option to get the review removed.

If you believe a guest’s review is unfair or retaliatory, you can dispute the review—no matter when it was posted. If the dispute is successful, the review and star rating associated with it will not be counted. 

 I hope this helps and I'll come back to you either way re question 2. 😊

[Sudha33]

Thank you for the detailed response Rebecca. A few thoughts:

1. Eligibility for getting a Tag may be different from the actual metrics used for assigning the tag. If AirBnB really looks at reviews as far back as 2 years, then don't you think it will be a little unfair for hosts who have taken measures to improve their ratings recently? I believe it will be based on more recent scores/metrics and I was wondering how "recent" that is. Also, I just noticed that there are other listings who have a rating of just 4.0 in the same town as us, but they do not have this Tag.

2. We will wait for your response.

3. Since the tag has been assigned to us on 1st May, we have received 0 bookings. This is despite having 85% First Page Search impressions (No. 2 on the list) and 8% Search-to-listing conversion. This being the peak summer tourist season in our town, we're pretty sure that the Tag has a role to play in it. So my point is, if we do not get any bookings, it will not make a difference if we use the published resources to improve our amenities/cleanliness, etc.

4. We already tried this for a couple of reviews which were clearly retaliatory in nature, where the guest had unreasonable demands and then used the reviews to get back at us. We were ready to show proof for it, but the AirBnB support kept giving the same response: "This review does not breach our policies. We do not mediate between guest and host. You have the option to leave a response to the review." While it is unfair for hosts to be held guilty unless proven otherwise, we are still ready to provide proof of the biased reviews, but AirBnB isn't willing to consider them.

[Helen3]

Personally @Sudha33 as a guest ...

I think it's a good thing that guests are notified when a listing falls in the bottom 10% of listings for an area.

hosts with lower ratings normally know why this is the case and have the opportunity to address any issues before it gets to a situation where they are labelled in the bottom 10%. 

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Helen3 I wonder if this new measure reflects the locality or a worldwide position. If the latter it does feel a little unfair as I suspect some countries get lower review scores than others. I hope it is a local top/bottom percentage otherwise it really doesnt add much to a guest's decision making. 

[Sudha33]

That's something we are also trying to figure out @Mike-And-Jane0 . We found out that there are other listings in the same area who have a much lower rating (4.0) than ours (4.61) but still don't have this tag. So now it has become a misleading classification. Also there are plenty of listing who are "New" or have 0 reviews and are hence perhaps excluded from the 10% calculation. So this seems like discrimination against seasoned hosts, who will ultimately get a few negative reviews over a period of time.

[Sudha33]

Hello @Helen3  I agree with you and as an experienced host, we have constantly upgraded our property and addressed all reasonable concerns raised by guests. But there are always things which are beyond our control, for example, a guest demanding a concierge/porter service to carry around their bags or a children's play area to keep their cranky kids engaged. We are a small property and do not have space to provide these services. We do not advertise these either. But then the guest vents their frustration in the reviews by making up reasons. A guest recently appreciated our property, the cleanliness and the amenities, but said the house is located in a "slum". This is just because a few houses in the neighborhood look different in this hill-town as compared to what you would find in larger cities. This review was then used by AirBnB to assign the Bottom 10% tag to us. There's nothing we can do about this kind of stuff, other than moving to some less stricter booking platform.

[Musee0]

I just saw this tag on a place I stayed previously for several months and honestly it's kind of baffling. If I wasn't smart enough to not blindly trust crass mediocre labeling like this, I may never have booked that place and missed out on what was actually a decent place for what I needed at the time.

As a guest, I can see why someone may want to see a label like this, but to me this label serves as a source of confusion, at the very least in my usual destinations. Not to mention, seeing "bottom 10%" alongside a >4.5/5.0 rating surely evokes cognitive dissonance in a normal person. I don't know, maybe Airbnb should be using a normal distribution and tagging the bottom standard deviation instead to point out outliers on the platform instead of painting a wide range (the 10%) of listings with this labeling?

[Zheng49]

It's actually kind of backwards, but I do get the feeling that generally 4.6/5.0 is actually in the bottom 10 percentile of Airbnb listings.

This is because when you are below 4.6 you are probably not in the first 15 pages/delisted/suspended etc. 

I don't know if this tag is a death sentence or not, but I do remember when first starting out, there was a period of time when the rating for our first listing was UNDER 4 and we were still getting a lot of bookings / fully booked in between suspensions.  We definitely got off to a rocky start but we were able to slowly work our way to Superhost and turn it all around. 

Although we took all reviews seriously, and took swift actions to address all the concerns we could. Also replied to all the reviews with legit criticisms that we could address/would address. During this period we also asked guests to leave reviews if they liked the place, which worked fairly well to quickly boost the rating. Later on I added guidebooks on nearby grocery store and restaurants which I feel like also helps.

[Musee0]

Yeah, I don't doubt that 4.6/5.0 etc is actually in the bottom 10% of listings and wasn't suggesting otherwise. It's just that, objectively, that should be an "acceptable" rating at the very least and it doesn't make much sense to label them with it if all it's going to do is result in noticeable market movement (Sudha here already stated that her listing's been affected after all).

Hence why I'm suggesting using a possibly more fair system where instead of using a fixed number like 10%, you use something like "4 standard deviations away from the center of the bell curve" (how many is reasonable requires looking at the actual data/curves) to label the bottom bracket with, which may be effectively 5%, 10%, or whatever depending on the region.

[Sudha33]

Hello @Zheng49 and @Musee0 Thanks for your thoughts and comments. I'd like to clarify a couple of points here for everyone's benefit:

1. We are still ranked No. 2 on the Search listings for our area i.e. No. 2 spot on Page 1 (sometimes No. 1 too). Hence the Search-to-listing conversion is still high, but bookings have fallen flat due to the label.

2. This is Not a stack ranking derived label, even if the name suggests so. There are several other properties in the area with a rating of 4 to 4.5, but they still don't have this tag.

AirBnB took one specific rating parameter (location) and recent feedback from one guest to assign this tag to us (details in my previous post).

IMHO the ideal solution would be to have an AI generated summary for each listing that highlights the positives and negatives picked from all reviews (example Amazon) and let the guest decide. Much better than assigning a Negative tag to the property that shouts, "hey don't book here or you'll regret it"

[Zheng49]

@Sudha33 I just did a quick search for Mount Abu, and I can see the problem may not be this label but maybe something else? I looked at the top rated property in Mount Abu, with a rating of 4.93/5.0 and it's still barely booked. 

Maybe travel is down in Mount Abu during the summer season.