Reviews

[Sandra210]

I have recently had a review that was very basic but told a total lie and air bnb refuse to take down the review due to their policy and they say that it dosnet breach any polices.  I feel its totally unacceptable for a guest to blatently lie about something.

I will try and be brief...

A guest booked for 3 nights, upon messaging him after he instant booked I informed him that I had a new mattress arriving on the 2nd day of his stay

and said to him would he be ok for us to gain entry and change the mattress he agreed.

The mattress and the  new protector and bedding was delivered by the company (*Dreams) on the 2nd day of his stay as discussed with him, the first person to sleep  on it and he got blood on the sheets and through onto the protector and didnt notify me.  The following day he left and didnt come back for his 3rd nights stay so in the morning at 6am when I got up I realised he hadnt stayed for the 3rd night went over to the property and found the blood stains.  I came back and messaged him  straight away I also photographed the stains.  He didnt respond to my message at all.  I left a review for him which did contain the information about how he had left and the mess.  

He left a review for us but it was very brief he said it was an uncomfortable bed, I promised to change the mattress but didnt!

that statement is a lie,  air bnb were sent all the information including receipts for the bed and bedding, a copy of the email confirming 

delivery too but still they allow the review to stay on my account.  I just do not get how they can allow a host to be lied about on their account like this with out some mechanism to protect them, its outrageous and I feel very let down by them.  I  have emailed the chief executive but he hasnt responded.  Air bnb need to review their policy about reviews and should protect their hosts from this sort of abuse as that is how I see it.

[Helen3]

@Nick  @Stephanie  can you help? 

[Anonymous]

@Sandra210 https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2673/airbnbs-review-policy

"While we encourage and expect all community members to post reviews that contain objective and accurate information, Airbnb doesn’t mediate disputes concerning the truth of reviews."

It's unsettling to think that this means lying is basically OK. But on the other hand, it would require a much more sophisticated and heavily staffed operation to investigate every claim in a disputed review for its veracity. Airbnb is not going to adopt a review policy that requires its service subcontractors to analyze documents just to decide whether to censor one of its customers. That would only increase the strain on labor resources while contributing nothing to the revenue stream or the product quality.

Fortunately, in this case I think your prospective guests will be far less influenced by a single, ineloquent one-sentence review than you might imagine. They'll quickly spot it as an outlier among hundreds of excellent reviews and immediately doubt its credibility. And anyway, it's not as though you're going to send a new mattress to every guest who finds the bed uncomfortable, so his complaint doesn't even make any sense.

[Lisa723]

@Sandra210 when responding to reviews, keep in mind that the reviewer is not notified of your response and is unlikely to ever see it. The people who do see it are other prospective guests viewing your listing, so any response should be directed to that audience. In this case I would have responded with something simple and professional like, "This review is factually false, and is retaliation for our attempt to collect a damage claim."

[Greg1661]

I am of the opinion that every bad (Far from accurate) review reported to Airbnb is somewhat investigated by Airbnb rep. to an extent. They do communicate with owner about the bad review by their message service and phone call.  However, Airbnb's #1 goal in events such as this is to be sure the customer is not offended. #1 GOAL. They want that customer to be sure to not have any reason at all for not returning to their website when it comes to another trip.  If that customer gets his kicks out of abusing the owner, especially if it comes to getting the customer from paying out for damage, etc, so be it.  They have a speech all ready to go for the owner, which is totally designed as a PR gimmick to have the owner absorb the cost.  They don't give a hoot about any contradictions to the review.  

[Huma0]

@Greg1661 

I suspect you are right. 

However, RE this statement:

---

@Greg1661 wrote:

I am of the opinion that every bad (Far from accurate) review reported to Airbnb is somewhat investigated by Airbnb rep. to an extent. They do communicate with owner about the bad review by their message service and phone call. 

I am not so sure about. Those are automated messages that will be sent out when a host gets a lower rating. That does not mean anyone is actually looking into it/making a note of the circumstances.

[Greg1661]

I've recently had a bad experience, and I did get both. The message I suppose could be a sophisticated robot answer. It did have specific details in regards to my customer. The phone call was a human. But human was programed like a robot that is for sure, as they have to stay on track for their speech of PR Propaganda. But it would not surprise me if they were not doing this as a universal routine. 

[Huma0]

@Greg1661 

What did the human (who acted like a robot - I have experienced the same), actually say?

[Greg1661]

After explaining that this customer had texted me about how comfortable she was and texted used the words "Perfect vacation", and now this same customer has a laundry list of complaints is a complete contradiction to her review, plus she texted me about how she wanted to stay another 2 nights. Another point of a total contradiction from the same person that has wrote this review. Then rep indicated airbnb was not interested in me sending the text messages to them. The reason airbnb is not interested in offending the customer as this probably would send the customer to another website, and there's no revenue in Airbnb for that. I can tell you their view is, this customer may not go back to same host, but as long as they come back to website and they get the revenue from anther host. As far as they are concerned. Mission accomplished. If someone is diverted from your listing due to  this review, it is A-OK, as they will go to another, and select another property. Revenue collected, Mission Accomplished. They are not a bit interested in being educating the public on their use of reviewing for abusive behavior, or mention any possible consequences. They don't have any consequences, because they don't want any consequences, as this would offend the customer.  

In this 21st century mentality, of writing what you want to relieve your anger, no matter how outrageous is A-OK by Airbnb.  Public illnesses are just not their problem is their point of view

[Huma0]

@Greg1661 

Okay. I'm not surprised by that at all. Once upon a time, it was possible to have a review removed for being untruthful/in retaliation for something. It happened to me and it was actually the Airbnb CS rep's suggestion. I was calling about a technical issue to do with my star ratings. The rep, who was not robotic at all, spotted this complete outlier of a review from a few months before and asked what happened. 

I explained the the guest had not read the listing/house rules properly, even though she claimed she did, that I had needed to mention to her some cleanliness and damage issues (never even asked for money, just asked her politely to be more careful) and to ask her to stop messaging me at 2am, and after that she turned nasty.

The rep read through the communication and also checked my listing/house rules. He agreed that the review and ratings the guest had left were lies and removed both. That was back in the day though...

Since then, a couple of things have changed. Firstly, see @Anonymous 's response above. A couple of years ago, Airbnb added that clause to their review policy: Airbnb doesn’t mediate disputes concerning the truth of reviews.

Hence why the rep was not interested in the text messages. This, no doubt, was to cover themselves and probably also to save time by not getting involved in review mediation, thereby leaving users wide open to abuse, revenge reviews and scammers. Of course, a guest can be on the receiving end of this, but it's more likely to be a host who suffers and, it's easy for a guest to start a new profile once they receive a bad review. It's not so easy for a host to delete everything and start again. 

The second thing is that, when the pandemic started, Airbnb laid off a lot of its experienced, knowledgeable frontline CS staff and replaced them with outsourced reps who have very little training, next to no authority to actually do anything, and read from a script, hence the robotic responses.