We had guests who, although delightful people, left our apartment in the worst state from a filth perspective than any of the hundreds of guests that we had hosted previously. Because I particularly liked them, I debated as to whether to mention the filth in the review. However, it took us twice as long to clean the apartment and I realised that, had we had guests coming in that same day, we would not have had time to prepare the apartment for them. I would have liked to have known that in advance and wanted to let other hosts know. I worded the review carefully, saying how much I liked the family and would host them again. At the end I said that although I would recommend them to other hosts, the hosts need to allow extra time to clean as the apartment was left very messy. I didn't use the words 'dirty' or 'filthy' which would have been more accurate.
The guests had had a wonderful stay with us and left on a high note. The only thing that I noticed when seeing them off was the sink piled high with dishes. If that was all that was wrong, I would have given them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that they had run out of time. However, there was food, blood and other unidentified marks on all the linen, the carpets, the sofa and even blood in the fridge and freezer. There were also empty bottles, wrappers, toilet tissue and other rubbish under the beds and furniture.
When her review was posted, she had rated me five stars in every category and gave a lovely review, even stating that what had started off as a horrible holiday in a previous Airbnb stay had been turned around by their stay at our place to an amazing holiday.
When she read my review, she contacted me privately through Whatsapp and accused me of giving them 'fake smiles' in order to get a good review and suddenly listed a whole lot of complaints about our apartment which had, up to that point, been 'perfect'. She told me that she was going to 'review her review' of my place as a result. I was under the understanding that, once the reviews were public, they could not be removed or edited. I discovered today that her review has been removed.
Has anybody else had this experience? What concerns me is that this means that our guests can be as bad as they like and no matter how good we as hosts are, if we say anything negative about them, they can remove their reviews. This means that other hosts do not get to see what they are like.
