The Review System is Broken

[Kevin-s0]

The hosts reading this, care about Airbnb and you most likely give negative reviews or positive ones of guests as they deserve them.

This is great! I applaud you.  You want Airbnb to work well-as do I.

However, a significant number of hosts “pass the trash.” They never give a negative review of a guest, for fear of it hurting their business.

This is not how the system was meant to work. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to fix it.

As you know, Airbnb requires us to give a certain number of reviews. But the type of review is not specified.  I’m not really in favor of specifying how many positive or negative reviews one must give. But that might be one rule to consider if many hosts are gaming the system.

Think about it! If you are the only host around you, giving the occasional negative review-let’s say, 1/20- then those who never do may well benefit from this. Otherwise, why would they refuse to ever review a guest who deserves it negatively.

I have hosted in Japan for three years now. I have NEVER read a negative review of a guest, written by a Japan based host. Isn’t that amazing! And I do read the reviews about guests coming to stay with us.

Many of the Airbnbs are run by large real estate companies in Japan. So they just automatically dole out positive reviews of any Tom, **bleep** and Hiroshi that comes to stay, whether they threw an all-night hum dinger of a party on Tuesday night or not.

You may think: Japanese guests are fantastic! The ones who travel abroad tend to be. However, the ones we get in Japan are a mixed bag. As well, hosts here mostly host guests from all over the world.

For Airbnb to work well, we need a level playing field. Some hosts are not playing fair. If you are not giving any negative reviews, you are a liar. You are not being honest with other hosts. Shame on you!

[Sarah977]

@Kevin-s0 While I agree wholeheartedly that the review system is highly flawed, and that there are too many hosts who give bad guests generic good reviews, I have to take exception to your last paragraph. I have never had to write a negative review because all of my guests have been lovely, honestly. I've only had a couple of challenging circumstances with guests, we worked it out amenably in the moment, and all was well- I had no reason whatsoever to give them a negative review.

Now this may have to do with the location of my listing, the fact that I only accept solo guests in one guest room, the type of guests who book my place, that most of my guests stay at least a week, who knows, but if I'd given any of those guests a bad review, then I would have been lying.

Do you think the fact that all Japanese hosts give their guests good reviews is cultural? I've never had any Japanese friends and never traveled to japan, but my understanding is that it's a very polite society. Would it be considered bad form, not culturally acceptable there, to give an honest, negative review of a bad guest?

Not that Japanese hosts are the only ones to give less than honest reviews- I see hosts from all over the world on these forums saying they have a hard time giving a bad review- that it feels "mean". Which I really can't understand- if a guest has disrespected you and/or your home, why would being "mean" even enter into the equation?

What I do think is that most people who offer their homes on Airbnb, particularly home-share hosts, are nice "people" people- they are friendly and sociable and until they started doing Airbnb, they probably never associated with nasty, lying, disrespectful people, aside from some "bad sheep" family member. So writing honest, but negative things about people, they find wrenching. 

[Branka-and-Silvia0]

@Kevin-s0 

As you know, Airbnb requires us to give a certain number of reviews....

No, this is not required anymore. https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Airbnb-Updates/Building-and-Improving-the-Superhost-Program/m-p/...