Tedious Guest Reviews

[Stephanie365]

Is AirBNB ever going to get the message that the review process for guests is both onerous and tedious and actively discourages guests from reviewing hosts? 

Since this platform is review-driven, the process should be simple and straight forward to encourage reviews. I've been hearing lately that the review process that guests must suffer through is becoming an increasing deterrent to guests leaving reviews at all. And then to turn around and punish hosts if enough guests don't leave reviews is pretty inequitable. 

Is this something the new IPO wannabe AirBNB is going to address?

[Emilia42]

@Stephanie365 That's because Airbnb needs guests to report on hosts so I would think the tedious review process is only going to grow longer and more in-depth. How else would Airbnb know if hosts are "following the rules."

Where do you see that hosts are being punished if they do not get enough reviews?

[Anonymous]

@Stephanie365  I've been through the full process recently as a guest (can DM you screenshots if you're interested). It's definitely longer than it used to be, with some steps that I found superfluous, but I wouldn't say it was so tedious that I would've considered giving up midway through. My biggest concern was that I was being asked to verify the presence of some amenities at a time when I was obviously no longer in the property. It's kind of weird to be treated as an unpaid property inspector when the time when you could give a reliable answer is already in the past. Don't count on me to tell you whether there was a hair dryer - how would I know, I don't even have hair!

Like @Emilia42  I'm also confused about this "punishment" - what penalty do you believe exists for a host not receiving a review?

[Kelly149]

@Anonymous @Emilia42 @Stephanie365 we used to get held to a standard of certain % of guests reviewing us, but someone realized that SH shouldn't be calculated on whether or not guests were hassled into reviewing

[Emilia42]

@Kelly149 Thankfully that is long gone. I always thought it should be in reverse. To encourage reviews, hosts should have to write a certain percentage of reviews for their guests. Serial non-reviewing hosts drive me nuts.  

[Laura2592]

If the new approach is to read these boards may I suggest something radical? How about the guest just says " I would recommend or stay again" or "I would not recommend/stay again" and a short review about the experience. I do think the reviews get longer and longer. They remind me of the performance reviews I have to give my employees. Next Airbnb will ask for 360 feedback on each host-- hours of questions with quantitative and qualitative results all done anonymously (in the day job these are stupid popular though the results are often useless.)

Airbnb should stop looking at reviews as a way to spy on hosts and more as a way that guests can alert others in the marketplace about whether or not this is a decent place to stay. Period.

[Anonymous]

@Laura2592 My suggestion (which has 0% chance of ever being considered) has long been that Airbnb go against the grain and disrupt the Black Mirror culture of star ratings by paring reviews down to two fundamentals: a binary set of yes/no questions for input to the algorithms, and a free-form text field for guests to express their own thoughts for input to human readers. It could work just the same the other way around; there's no use in asking how well guests followed the House Rules on a scale of 1 to 5 - either they followed them or they didn't.

The effect I'd hope to achieve in a system like that is that hosts are motivated to maximize the accuracy of their offerings rather than castrate themselves in the face of trouble out of fear for their ratings. And that guests are nudged toward finding their most genuinely compatible listings, without being distracted by meaningless numbers and orange icons. I'd like for the question people ask themselves in the booking process to not be "Is this a decent place to stay according to Karen and Chad" but rather, "is this place with all its pros and cons the right place for me?"

The broader project there is something rather idealistic - I really like the idea of the host-guest relationship being one of adults engaging in honest trade rather than one of whiny children being babysat by a digital hybrid of Helicopter Parent and Evil Robot.  And we'd all like to throw some Tylenol at the Fever for the flavor of stupid refunds. Those threads are all in the same fabric, when Airbnb is pressing toward more standardization and more of what comes off to many as spying.