@Anonymous
I know this is an old thread, recently resurrected...
@Anonymous wrote:
This is one of the most frequent topics here, and one very sharp veteran host discovered a detail that was news to many of us: if the guest submits an Overall star rating but doesn't input any stars for the individual category ratings, they each automatically default to 5 stars. How weird is that?
I think you might be referring to me here (or maybe my ego is getting the better of me) and, if so, that information was definitely correct at the time that I created a thread about it, as I did look into it in some detail. The system then showed that the guest had left 5* in every category, when they had actually not rated those categories at all. That didn't mean that the ratings became 5*, rather they didn't count towards the average for those categories shown on the listing. It was only from the host end that it LOOKED like the guest had rated them 5*.
However, I was told more recently by an experienced host, who also travels fairly frequently as an Airbnb guest, that it is not the case anymore because guests now MUST fill in all the individual star categories during the review process. I don't know if that is true or not. I should have paid attention to this when I last stayed in an airbnb, which was a few weeks ago, but I didn't think about it at the time.
If anyone else is about to review a listing, it would be great if you could let us know if you have to rate all the categories to proceed with the review or not.