two faced reviews?

[Michael83]

I have two questions, sort of related.  The first is, can a guest leave ratings without writing a review?  Sometimes we have a guest who writes what looks like a nice review, with no suggestions for improvement or private comments to give you a clue what their problem might have been, but our stats are dinged for stuff.  Sometimes the same guest even left a nice note in our guestbook! 

In addition, if that is the case that guests can rate you without actually writing anything, how you can figure out which guest it was?

The second question is, if you think you know which guest left bad ratings, is it OK to message them and ask for an explanation, or better toi just let it go? 

I'm disheartened because we normally get great reviews with only an occasional bad rating (superhosts), and recently we got dinged on just about everything, but the written review sounded quite positive! 

Any help appreciated, thanks.

[Cynthia-and-Chris1]

C'est la vie... the woes of hosting.

If you really need to know why someone left you the ratings they did, you can obviously message them.  But most of the time it's not worth it and better to let it go.

[Bruce-and-Wren0]

Is it possible that the guest thought one star meant a good rating?  If someone really seemed to enjoy your listing but left you all ones it might be worth considering.

[Michael83]

unfortuately they gave us 5 for location, otherwise I would love the possibility...

[David126]

There is some sort of weird auto correct on here, star not state.

[David126]

Do not believe there is a minimum number of charachtters for a review.

People vary with their understanding of the stars. ABB is a 5 State system, some guests will think 4 is exceptional, 3 normal.

[Annette33]

@Michael83,  most guests as well as hosts post only nice stuff in their reviews, it actually doesn't mean that much as everybody is chasing those 5 star reviews...but now and then you have someone being nice to your face who then comes out with criticism in their review, or with lesser stars in their ratings. Though it would bug me too, I would just let it go  - those people are gone, the review is done, you will never see them again. Especially if you are not 100% sure who it was that gave you that questionable review, you are only opening yourself up to more problems if you approach the wrong person about it.

There is a way to monitor who it was that gave you less stars than what you anticipated: Go into your stats ( I can only get there via my desktop) , scroll down to "ratings from guests", that will tell you the story. As names are not mentioned, you just got to monitor it after each guest (that has posted a review and rated you)  has departed, and compare it to what it was before. aside from overall experience, you can also click through on all the other parts, cleanliness, accuracy, etc. on the left, and the bar comes up for those as well.  Once you know for sure that  a certain person wrote you a great review, but gave you lower stars at the same time, you can always politely mention that in your response right underneath their review.

[Michael83]

Thanks Annette,

Yes, I do monitor that stats page every day, and that was why I asked if it was possible for a guest to leave ratings without an actual review.  Sometimes it seems the stats change without a new review to go with them, but I've never been quite sure about it.  And yes, sometimes I've gotten five for overall but still been dinged for a specific item.  The last two have been really discouraging, however, because we got dinged for cleanliness twice in a row, after doing everything the same as we always do, and that last one dinged us for everything but location, yet the folks were sweet as pie, left a nice note in our guestbook, and a nice sounding review...

The couple right before them, however, left without signing our book or saying goodbye after a 5 day stay, so almost expected a bad review from them, and haven't seen anything.  Sometimes it just seems like you can't make people happy.

I'm going to try to forget about it and hope for better in the future!

Thanks again for your reply and thanks to everyone else who took the time to reply.