AirBNB notified me this morning that a guest who left a positive review of her stay with us 21 days ago is now requesting AirBNB to remove our review of her stay, even though the review we left was factual and honest. AirBNB also allowed her to withdraw her (good) review of our flat, once she saw that our review was not positive (but was factual).
I thought AirBNB's ToS prohibited retaliatory actions by guests and hosts in exchange for leaving good reviews. When I reviewed this guest, I was unemotional, factual, detailed and specific and reviewed only the things which were well documented in AirBNB's service app. We had no idea whether this guest, who asked us to cancel our other guest's booked stays (!!) to accommodate her request for an extension among other things, would leave us a positive or negative review. But AirBNB says multiple times that hosts should leave honest, fair feedback, and that's what I provided.
AirBNB says that once both reviews are published, they are uneditable. I'm no rocket scientist, but if I submit work to my publisher and delete sentences, chapters, paragraphs--that's an edited submission. Once this guest's review was published, we received an email saying:
"Now that you’ve both written reviews, we’ve posted them to your Airbnb profiles. While X’s feedback can’t be changed or removed, you can write a response that will appear directly below it."
I am extremely disappointed that AirBNB is allowing this retaliatory reaction by a guest. Her review of her stay was accurate "Bright, clean flat in good location. We appreciated the little touches like tea, biscuits, soap etc. Thank you [host names]," and she even left us private feedback to thank us for hosting her. This is clear, retaliatory action for leaving an honest review--not to mention that this guest asked us to violate AirBNB's ToS by requesting that we cancel other guest's stays to accommodate her request for an extension.
Has anyone else been through this experience? If guests can withdraw positive reviews after seeing that hosts left them negative reviews, what is the point of this review system at all?