Does Airbnb not provide the numerical star rating for guests anymore?

[Ben242]

Does Airbnb not provide the numerical star rating for guests anymore?

I had someone mention it was because my "Instant Book" was turned off.  I turned it on, logged out/in of website, cleared cache, refreshed multiple times, still don't see guests star rating...

Could it be because I am no longer a "Super Host"?

Do they provide the numerical star rating for hosts to guests?

I think not providing the numerical star rating of a guest is complete negligence and total disregard for the hosts, host property and neighborhoods of hosts property.  Since Covid many guests in urban areas have had to lower their prices to attract business.  This has led to some guests that don't properly respect house rules, property or neighbors.  Its really important we know who is coming into our properties.  Please provide star ratings for guest to all hosts.  No reason to hide this info. 

Its for the good of the entire community.  Bad guests that don't respect house rules, property, neighbors not only causes problems for hosts but Airbnb as well.  These types of problems are why Airbnb has so many problems with neighborhoods all over the world and new laws are getting passed on a global scale preventing Airbnb from operating...

[Anonymous]

@Ben242  The Guest Star Rating has never been visible to hosts not using Instant Book. But I don't know how long it takes after turning IB back on to get it working again. I guess there is some control built in against hosts just turning IB on for a few minutes to see the ratings and then back off again before any bookings come in.

For the record, I think it's totally crap that they deliberately hide this data from hosts who  screen their guests. Either ratings are useful data that should be available to everyone, or they're useless data that shouldn't be collected. There's not an ethically defensible argument for playing peekaboo with ratings just to manipulate hosts out of a screening process that their safety might depend on.

[Lawrene0]

I'm still seeing the star ratings of booked current and past guests, @Ben242 . Checked that just today. However, Robin, an Australian superhost using IB, says he cannot see them, and hasn't been able to for some time. 

So it sounds as if there is some sort of roll-out happening. I hope it is rolling toward seeing the stars, and not toward hiding them.

[Sarah977]

As a non-IB host I've never bee able to see guest star ratings. But I really put no faith in tem, because what to me might be a 3 star guest might be a 5* guest to you. Star ratings tell you nothing about why a particular score was given.

On another hosting forum, a host described the behavior of his guests and asked for input from other hosts on what ratings to give those guests. The responses ranged from 2*s to 5*s, and these were all experienced hosts responding.

So that tells me that star ratings are virtually useless when determining whether a guest will be a good one or not. Honest written reviews and the way a guest communicates are much more accurate tools for guaging whether to accept a booking or not.

[Ben242]

Yeah I think if you have IB off you don't see the guests "Star Rating"...I find it helpful.  If guest is bad they get screened out pretty quick....some hosts are timid to write a bunch of negative things about a guest because they think it will make them seem like a difficult host.  I agree that it can't be only tool used to screen guests though

[Anonymous]

@Ben242  It's why when you review a guest, it's important to convey the relevant details in the text, and not just leave a passive-aggressive star rating. The hosts who depend most on the reviews can't see those star ratings, and even if they could, they're useless as a predictor of whether a problem that occurred in one stay is likely to recur in another.  There is a subset of hosts that write dishonestly positive text reviews while expressing their real opinions in the star ratings. That behavior is totally counterproductive and does a disservice to us all.

[Pamela1060]

I'd like to know how they arrive at the star rating. I thought it would be simple math. For example, I have 3 ratings and a score of 4.67 and I only see the following numeric values:

Cleanliness  5.0

Accuracy 5.0

Communication 5.0

Location 4.7

Check-in 5.0

Value 4.7

Now math has never been my strong suit, but if you add these 6 numbers together and divide by 6, shouldn't I have a 4.9? That would put me in super host category, once I get enough bookings, of course. Why is my rating lower than what the numbers indicate? 

Pam

[Sarah977]

@Pamela1060 The overall rating is not an average of the individual category ratings. It's a separate rating that the guest gives.

Your overall rating, the one that appears on your listing, is calculated by multiplying the number of "overall" 5* ratings, the number of 4* ratings, the number 3* ratings, adding them up and dividing by the total number of reviews.

5  5* reviews= 25

2  4* reviews =  8

1   3* review   =  3

Total                    36 ÷ 8 reviews= 4.5

[Pamela1060]

Thanks for the clarification. So if the location and value are the low numbers, does anyone have any suggestions for improving? We accurately represented the location of the house- sound views, quick walk to the beach, restaurants etc. Why would someone ding us on location if they know where they're going and we've accurately depicted the location? And why can't we know which guests gave us which score so that we can follow up with questions for them? Airbnb can let us know after we leave our reviews so that owners don't blackball guest by giving them poor guest scores if guests give the hosts poor host scores. 

[Sarah977]

@Pamela1060  You can see the ratings each guest gave you by going to your reservations page and clicking on "Details" next to each guest's name. (At least I think that's where I found it).

Do not concern yourself at all with the location or value ratings. They are totally fickle and there is nothing you can do to improve them, aside from making sure you have described your location clearly.

Guests will give low location ratings because they "wished" it was closer to the beach, or downtown, or wherever, even though they booked, knowing that it wasn't near the beach, or downtown. And other nonsensical reasons. Same with value- if it wasn't free, it was too expensive. However, if you get consistently low value ratings, make sure your pricing is reasonable for your area and what you offer.

There's no use asking guests about those ratings, as their answers would be largely absurd. 

However, if you were getting low accuracy ratings, for instance, that would be worth asking about. Sometimes hosts think they have made everything clear in their listing info, but it might not be clear to guests and may need tweaking.