Bad review

[Jordan478]

Hi,

I am a relatively new host. Up until now I have only had 5 star reviews and very happy guests.

Recently I had a one night reservation. The girl booked for one person which at the last minute I found out she will come with her boyfriend. I requested a reservation change with an extra small fee for the second person (5$), which she did not take lightly.

Eventually 4 hours before they checked in she accepted the reservation change saying she is very disappointed she has to pay for 2 people. When they came over to pick up the keys I have informed them that they need to close and lock the apartment door as we live on the ground floor. I have also printed out the house rules which I left on the table for them to see. This rule was also on my airbnb listing as well.

Anyway when the left the apartment they left the door wide open, when I saw I took a picture and sent it to them making them aware that they did not close the door and they broke the rule. They didnt respond to it. Finally they came back at the apartment around 11pm.

One of the rules of the building is that showers are forbidden between 11pm and 6 am because of the noise (it is an old building and it disturbs the neighbours). At 11:15 they both went to the bathroom and started taking a shower. They woke me up because of the noise and I went to knock on the door. I explained to them that what they are doing is against the rules and they can take a shower the next morning, to which they laughed in my face and said they will complaint to airbnb. At that point I called airbnb (11:30pm) and told them about the situation. They explained that they will inform the guests about the house rules again.

Needless to say they left me a horrible review, which dropped my views and my listing dramatically. I contacted airbnb to remove the review, but I heard nothing back.

Does anyone have any advice on how to handle this?

Thank you.

Jordan

[Rowena29]

@Jordan478 

Im so sorry you've had such an unpleasant experience.

sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but your chance of removing this review is VERY slim - airbnb just aren't interested.

However all your other reviews are great and frankly your guest sounds a bit unhinged   -  the review reflects on her, not on you. I doubt that future guests will take any notice at all. Your best bet is to leave a factual, professional, brief response to her criticism that puts everything in perspective. BEar in mind this repsonse is for the benefit of future guests - not really the awful guest you are responding to.  by all means come back to this forum and post what you plan to say to get some feedback and advice.

Of course the decreased stars hurt a lot. Especially as they are so unfair. Again not a lot you can do, but you can try to ensure it happens less in the future.

I have a statement in my listing, house rules and pre booking message that extra guests cost extra. When a guest books. I state this again and say if this is a problem , they can cancel penalty free within the next xxx hours.

It's easy to be wise in hindssight, but as soon as I encountered attitued from this guest - being disgruntled over the very reasonable extra guest fee, I would have been inclined to cancel. She obviously had not read the listing, and her hostility, instead of apology, would have rung alarm bells.

Guests like this are entitled and just not worth it. It's a great lesson to them to have their booking cancelled   - it teaches them to behave more respectfully in the future,  ( maybe) and it saves you from a negative review.

Try to put it behind you, hard as it is, and focus on your next great guest. Something I have discovered, the firmer i am, the stricter I am, the more I encourage guests to cancel if they are not happy with my rules, the friendlier and more respectful my guests become. 

Just my opinion.

Good luck

[Helen350]

I agree @Rowena29  , but can someone clarify for me, if we cancel a guest who arrives, (or is about to arrive) with a bad attitude, do we get cancellation penalties, & loss of SH? Do we get the line on our profile that says we cancelled, or do we write a review for the bad guest, & they write no doubt a damning one for us? Only once have I had a guest arrive with an extra person & argue over paying extra.... I let them stay cos of the repercussions, plus the difficulty of contacting CS, but it's good to know for the future....

[Rowena29]

@Helen350 

I'm loathe to say anything specific regarding your question because there are so many reports of Cs not sticking to their policy.  It also depends whether you have IB or not. But in my limited experience of cancellations ( i've only cancelled one guest,) I rang Cs and said I was extremely uncomfortable with the guest. I had messages on the platform which supported my case.   The guest was cancelled without penalty to me. I certainly didn't get a fee or a "this booking was cancelled 2 days prior to the trip" or my dates blocked. They were only my 3rd guests so i was nowhere near superhost, but pretty sure that wouldn't have been affected. I am reasonably sure if the host cancels and its less than 24 hours til check in, a review can still be left by both parties. If the guest cancels, i THINK they don't get the option to review.  I agree with you about how difficult it is to deal with extra guests on arrival day - it's too late to add to the booking, and I personally have found the request money feature useless.

I get around this by saying in my listing, in my pre booking message and again after booking something along the lines of " I  require the full legal names of each guest staying. This is an insurance requirement  Only the number of guests booked and paid for are allowed on the premises. If you have additional guests, you need to amend the booking. "  I find making sure I have the full names before arrival helps to dissipate any "misunderstandings".  I have 2 days advance notice, so no one can just IB and turn up

[Anonymous]

@Jordan478   I read X's review, and it only made her look bad.. The best thing you can do is post a public response to it. Just bear in mind that the audience for that response is your future guests - don't make the common mistake of addressing the guest or echoing her bad attitude. 

While this guest's review is stupid ("retire the shampoo"? ha!)  there's nothing about it that breaks Airbnb's content policy, so I'm not sure where you got the idea that you can just have it removed. But that's a waste of time.

Your bookings and views probably have dropped dramatically, but only because that is happening to everyone right now. The Coronavirus scare has severely impacted travel and the uncertainty has put an abrupt halt to travel plans. You can also expect cancellations of some of your upcoming bookings. But you have a beautiful room and very affordable for Copenhagen, so when business picks up again I'm sure this dumb review won't stop people from booking.

[Ocean50]

"I requested a reservation change with an extra small fee for the second person (5$), which she did not take lightly. Eventually 4 hours before they checked in she accepted the reservation change saying she is very disappointed she has to pay for 2 people."

This should be a red flag and I would offer her to cancel the booking since she is so disappointed, then I might escalated to airbnb depend on what she say next, I might cancel the reservation if she is making it too uncomfortable. As a new host we tend to go toward accommodating our guests, but I learn it very quickly if the guest haven't arrived and already acting unrespectful, 100% sure with you they will turn out to be bad guests.

Reply to her review stating basically what you said here, point out that all recent guests have no problem at all, how she is ignoring all listed house rules (which is very standard house rules), and be supper professional on your reply. You might think next guest read these reviews from both sides and don't know who is right or wrong here but that's completely fault. Everyone with half of a brain will know who is at fault.

[Elena87]

@Jordan478 

At least the guests review is garbled and has the very unlikely claim that the shower commenced at '22.56' - Outstanding memory or the lady doth complain too much.

First I would be minded to leave a public response to the review, something along the lines of;

'' It's probably a good moment to remind all our guests that our shower should only be utilized between 0600 and 2300 with due respect and consideration to our neighbours''

As for the matter of the extra fee, on the positive side I'd say it is experience won for you - in future you probably wont be minded to waste time haggling with guests and more likely to cancel using the ''uncomfortable with the guest'' cancellation button. Don't get dragged into a guests drama.

As Andrew sagely points out above, there are numerous reasons for lower bookings, it's still pre-Easter yet and you shouldn't necessarily equate the review with the current business trends. Don't take it to heart, airbnb is a percentages game and every so often someone will come along that disappoints you, it's regrettably an occupational hazard. 

[Anonymous]

One caveat there: that penalty-free cancellation option is only for Instant Bookings.

[Kath9]

@Jordan478, I agree with the others here. Your guest being disgruntled about having to pay an extra 5 euros for a second person is a big red flag. She sounds like a conpletely entitled and disrespectful person. Presumably, you left her a review? If so, leave a brief, professional public response to her review, something like: 

'X was unhappy with her stay because she was asked to pay for a second person who wasn't on the original booking. The guests failed to observe house rules, including leaving the front door wide open when they went out and taking a shower outside of the time allocated by the building management. They ignored or openly laughed at my requests to observe the house rules' . That should help put it in perspective for other prospective guests.

[John816]

Hello Jordan, 

Sorry to hear about that. Everyone else is right, they are being petty. However, in my experience I tend to avoid the possibility of something like this happening, especially early in your airbnb hosting experience when every rating matters. I haven't had this situation exactly since we don't charge extra for couples. But if I did, and this happened, I'd be asking myself "Is charging an extra $5 at the last minute really worth the likely bad review they will give me? And is it worth leaving them with a bad vibe, so they are less likely to care about treating your place well?" Usually the answer, at least for me, is no.

That being said, we have enough reviews at this point that we don't really worry about the odd negative review when it's a matter of principal. 

To sum things up, in this case you are right in what you did. But is being right and getting $5 extra worth the trouble in this case? Probably not.

Plus, in three years of hosting, it's only happened to me a couple of times where someone extra shows up. In the cases in which they do, you can always mention it in your review of them.

[Patti59]

So the problem with a bad review is that it brings all your good reviews down by several points and when your star number is below 4.7 they can kick you off airbnb.  That is what has happened to me.  It takes a lot of 5 star reviews to get your rating back up and unfortunately last season (it's Canada and we only operate May - Oct.) I was not able to recover and they removed my listings.  I am not giving up yet because I have 2 listings and am hoping to get at least 1 back on I just don't know if it is going to happen.  I am very upset about this since I have invested a lot into these listings and now no one can even see our upgrades or see the listings at all!

It would be nice if the 5 star reviews would be see but at the moment nothing is being seen.  This 3 night reservation has ruined my hosting completely!  

[Patti59]

Forgot to mention this would have been my 7th year hosting and I am really going to miss the experience of meeting so many amazing people.  

[Sean433]

@Patti59 

I still see that you have 2 listings. So I assume they only removed the listings with less than a 4.7 rating? Curious to know what the exact rating was before they removed it?

I have seen some listings with a 4.2 and they were still up so I don't know how someone with a 4.6 or 4.7 can be removed.

[Sarah977]

@Patti59 @Sean433  I've seen places with 3 star ratings still listed and I recall @Susan17 saying there was one on the first page on a London search that was 2.5!