Poor reviews for just one listing

[John118]

Hi,

I receive guests into my home using two listings - either as an entire apartment or as a single room in the apartment, shared with either myself or my wife. For both options, it's exactly the same space, same level of cleanliness, same welcome, same services, same everything. And the entire space, for four people and with exclusive access to all spaces, is priced very competitively, coming to around twice the price of the single room, sometimes less.

However: while the single room gets glowing five star reviews for everything, the entire space has been getting awful reviews, with complaints about cleanliness and other stuff besides. I'm baffled by this discrepancy. Have I just been unlucky with fussy guests for the entire space? Are expectations automatically higher when people occupy the whole space? Does the whole space attract a different type of guest? And as the space is obviously exactly the same, can I use this to appeal to AirBnB to have the poor ratings changed?

Your advice and input would be appreciated,

Thanks, John.

[Amaris0]

Hi John, 

I'm sorry to hear your predicament. It is a hard one because each guest is entitled to their own option based on their stay regardless of what other guest may have experienced.

Acceptable levels of cleanliness also differ for each person and Airbnb is unable to disregard a guest's experience by removing their comments unless it is found to be of a malicious nature. You could however contact the guest, to ask out of interest and perhaps for future reference in order to prevent similar experience, what issues they had with the cleanliness of the property. If you find their response to be nit-picky, then you have the opportunity to respond to their review and mention their reason for scoring you low on this aspect; this way any future guest will have information from both parties in order to make their own informed decision.

Wish you all the best,

Ama