Airbnb review content policy

[Jacob193]

I spoke to an Airbnb case manager, who told me, repeatedly and adamantly, that Airbnb will only remove review content that is both illegal and violates intellectual property rights. Their policy as written is as follows (with emphasis added):

The following content is never allowed on Airbnb:

• Content created solely for the purpose of advertising or other commercial content, including company logos, links, or company names
• Spam, unwanted contact, or content that is shared repeatedly in a disruptive manner
• Content that endorses or promotes illegal or harmful activity, or that is profane, vulgar, obscene, threatening, or harassing
• Content that is discriminatory (review our Nondiscrimination Policy for more info)
• Attempts to impersonate another person, account, or entity, including a representative of Airbnb
• Content that is illegal or that violates another person’s or entity’s rights, including intellectual property rights and privacy rights
• Content that provides specific details or outcomes of an Airbnb investigation
• Content that is sufficient to identify a listing’s location or other content that may pose a personal safety risk to an Airbnb community member

To me, this clearly says that any illegal content is a violation of their content policy, but the case manager assured me that this was not the case. Am I crazy?

[Jacob193]

When I say "slightly less than dazzling"...it wasn't an awful review. But I know that anything less than five stars on everything probably isn't going to make someone happy. 

[Kelly149]

@Jacob193 abb says that guests don't know what stars they receive. And as you learned, you did have a reason to be "uncomfortable". A guest having a reason to treat your listing badly or review you badly is a problem waiting to happen. And a guest that you called out for not planning well and not being a great guest is not going to be happy with you. An IB can be the easiest type of reservation to cancel and after reading his review (&yours) maybe the real mistake here was accepting the last minute desperate bad mannered request in the first place.

[Elena1265]

Hello everybody

so interesting to read your comments about reviews...

i have been an airbnb host for a couple of year now and have 18 sparkling  5 star reviews on my unit. 100% positive reponses, nice guests.

however, I just had a guest from HELL.

no inkling of any kind of issues until AFTER check out.

the first comment starts with a statement how very disappointing the experience and how misleading the advertising of the property.

I follow up asking for more detail.

Well, here come accusations of NO daily housekeeping (daily housekeeping was never advertised or promised in any way). complaints of 7am-4pm loud grass cutting AND to top it off BEDBUGS.

I suspect this is an experienced guest seeking to DESTROY.

i am at a loss on how to prevent her malicious review.. at a loss for a response of any kind. this kind of review will destroy me - where is the justice in this world?!

[Sarah977]

@Elena1265  You can't really prevent her review, but if you don't get a notification that she has already left a review, wait until day 13 and a half to leave one for her- that way if she hadn't gotten around to submitting one, she might not see that you have left one in time to leave one herself.

I suspect that she is making up all these complaints because she wants you to refund her, even if she hasn't said as much, in other words, extortion in exchange for not leaving you a bad, lying review.

Even if she does leave a review, it will stand out as an aberration among  your 18 5*, glowing reviews-it won't put any guests off booking with you, especially if you leave a response to her review along the lines of "This guest apparently is unclear on what an Airbnb booking is and expected daily maid service as if she was staying in a hotel. The allegations of lawn mowing all day and bedbugs is ludicrous. All our other reviews should make this obvious."

However, make sure you only respond to what she actually writes in the review, not anything she has sent you as private feedback.

If she is messaging you these things now, I would not respond to her private feedback at all. If she threatens to leave you a bad review if you don't give her some refund, contact Airbnb and tell them she is trying to extort you and they hopefully won't allow her to post a review, or will remove it if she posts one.

[Stephen63]

Airbnb apparently doesn't care if a guest leaves an obviously, provably false review that is also defamatory.  I'm really fed up with being unsupported by the company in the extremely rare event that this happens.  What happened to Airbnb's promise that it was developing a tool (or at least empowering it's "customer support" reps) to remove "outlier" reviews?

[Nas2]

I would suggest the following,

Read through the review again and check the Airbnb content policy. From their point out the places that you feel the review has breached the content policy. Point this out to the case manager that's looking after this. Also if you don't agree on the first case manager's decision you can always re-escalate this to a new case manager which will look at this hopefully with a different frame of mind.

I have successfully had some reviews removed but unfortunately I have also had some harsh reviews which stayed on my profile. I also know that we can't please every guest and some guests will leave bad reviews no matter what we do.

[Ridhwan6]

I have had an issue too with bad review, it started with their faulty gps location service which has located my listing wrongly and not allowing hosts to edit it. A guest whom had booked the place a week earlier received a notice from me for the exact location but unfortunately this guest purposely said the location was wrong and I gave inaccurate information, which was entirely caused by their faulty gps services, even though that I have sent him the correct location personally few days earlier! In my defence the review clearly refers to circumstances outside of my control which is against their review policy! But the case manager said no, I should have contacted them earlier to fix it, therefore it was my fault and they’re not gonna remove it. The case manager’s name is Ericka and she’s not helpful at all, refuse to admit that there’s an error with their gps service (I have met another host that encountered the same issue), she also blamed everything on me, and most importantly refuse to consider that the review has violated the policy. Shame on Airbnb for such a poor and disappointing support. 

[Mary1211]

Yeah - no - it's gotten rough - I used to have decent flexibility for reviews where the complaints were basically the guest's fault - IE something explained in the listing that they seemed oblivious to ("I have dogs,") nothing they sought to fix ("The hallway in the light kept me up at night and I couldn't sleep but I didn't talk to host about it who would have explained it was kept on for our sake and we could turn it off whenever."), etc. which seemed pretty reasonable - can't fix what 

A. isn't necc a problem

B. Isn't communicated 

But now dealing with crazy things like negative reviews from bookings that never happened that airbnb their selves cancelled because the guest was being unreasonable and yet some how they can still leave a review?