Mutually agreed review revision

[Inna22]

Today I gave a guest a lower star review than I should have. My cleaning crew said they left a horrible mess just to realize we were talking about two different houses. Luckily I did not say anything in the public part, only lowered the stars. I feel so horrible. I messaged Airbnb just in case but of course nothing can be done. EBay allowed for a mutually agreed review revision and Amazon allows to revise whenever whatever. It would have been a nice feature for both sides.

[Gordon0]

I understood you were allowed to delete (not change) a review, @Inna22, has this changed?

[Inna22]

@Gordon0 I thought so too but it seems to no longer be an option

[Kelly149]

@Inna22  as a flipside, how many times has ABB CS been told 'I made a mistake, I meant the stars to be higher' and their answer was 'oh well, it'll all work out'... things happen, all those commercial hosts never even look at reviews, it likely matters much less than you think it does

[Inna22]

@Kelly149 I feel really bad.  This should be something easily corrected

[Kelly149]

@Inna22  I know. And you’re right it should be fixable, but unfortunately with ABB just bc something should be, doesn’t make it so. Assuage yourself that this will likely matter not at all to the guest. 

[Inna22]

@Kelly149 thank you. You always make me feel better

[Robin4]

@Inna22 

Airbnb do seem to be getting more hard-line where the tampering of reviews is concerned. 

The policy used to be that the review must remain unless it was demonstrably untrue or would cause offence. In the latter case a review could be changed.

With regard to one of my past guests I stupidly submitted the review without fully checking it. All I did was quickly scan for incorrect spelling which shows up as red underlined, but on reading my review the computer spell-checker had changed his name to an offensive term. As soon as I discovered my error I got onto CS and (after they stopped laughing) agreed to change the guests name to that which had been intended. So in those days, it was possible to have a review altered.

The strange thing is, the corrected review remained on the guests profile for some considerable months, and then all of a sudden disappeared entirely!

It appears these days very little effort is made by CS to establish whether a review is correct or not, they are more intent on not upsetting the guest.

It is probable Inna that all you can do is post a correction in each of the review responses and hope that others will pick it up from there.

Have a great Christmas Inna.

Cheers........Rob

[Inna22]

@Robin4 that's a funny story. Airbnb should not even have to be involved if the process is mutual. It can all be automated. After telling me this could not be done, the rep messaged me three times and called twice to apologize and make sure I do not need anything else. It was annoying more than anything else. I wish they made as much of a deal over a party report I made last week (someone said they wanted to throw a party and then told me they were able to book with another host). I barely got Airbnb to respond and I am sure they did nothing about it. This rep should have been moving on helping someone else instead of neurotically making she I was ok

[Robin4]

@Inna22 

The problem with mutual decisions between guest and host is.....where do you draw the line with automated alterations? Airbnb's stance has always been, an Airbnb review is a genuine statement where collusion between parties is not possible. Maybe Airbnb were worried about their reps making judgement calls when it came to alterations and decided to take the decision out of their hands, who knows.

All I know is, it used to be possible, now it isn't, the review either stands or it gets removed, no third option!

Inna, these reps are paid to close cases, not resolve them. By closing a ticket, that is a problem that does not have to be passed up the chain to a company employee.

It works for the company because it enables them to limit their full time staff numbers. The fact that your issue did not get resolved is not important in the support structure!

This Community Centre is, to the company, a level of support but, it is not Airbnb. The moderators of the CC work for a British  company called Standing on Giants. Their offices are in Westbourne Park in central London, sandwiched in between Kensington and Notting Hill. The CC is not in Brannan St in San Francisco. But the CC is valuable to Airbnb because it puts Airbnb users from around the world together to help each other solve their problems and in many instances with more qualified help than is available further up the chain.

Email support is the next step up the support chain where the rep has access to your account and bookings via the confirmation code but cannot make changes to it, only make recommendations, but, they do have a hotline to God if they can't solve a problem....... and then you come to phone support. What that rep was doing by continually coming back to you was to get you to respond with a 'No, I am done' response so she could close the ticket! 

Cheers.........Rob

[Sarah977]

@Inna22  While it seems ridiculous that a simple error can't be corrected, I can sort of understand why Airbnb doesn't allow changes. They really have no way of knowing if a host and guest have colluded as far as changing the reviews or ratings. 

I can easily imagine a host and guest who gave each other poor reviews offering to change the review if the other does the same. Or a somewhat inexperienced or fearful host being intimidated by a nasty guest who is harrasing them by phone or text into changing a review.