Disable Reviews for Last-minute Cancellations

[Mac17]

Airbnb,

It's absolutely insane that this isn't already a thing! Check this out:

From August 2017 with 23 kudos: https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Host-Voice/Guest-Cancels-Reservation-Day-of-Check-In-and-is-Stil...

From October 2017 with 44 kudos: https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Host-Voice/Guest-Cancellations-should-be-seen-on-their-review-pa...

From November 2017 with 28 kudos: https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Host-Voice/New-review-process-for-cancelled-bookings/idi-p/55066...

There is absolutely no reason a guest should be allowed to rate a listing based on cleanliness, accuracy, value, arrival, and location if they have never been to the location! Same for hosts: we should not be allowed to rate a guest based on cleanliness and observance of house rules if they never stayed in the house! 

I have been in the situation a few times now where my guest cancels on the day of the reservation. I feel like I am forced to give a refund if it is requested (which, it always is), even though my cancellation policy would require them to pay the full amount, because they have an opportunity to review me. Who is going to give a positive review to the mean host who didn't give a full refund upon request? 

Also, if hosts are marked with a "scarlet A" when we cancel on a guest, should it not be the same for a guest who cancels last-minute on us? 

This is the logic your developers need to put into place: if a guest cancels on the day of his or her check in, reviews from host and guest are disabled and an automatic review is posted to the guest's profile, "Guest cancelled reservation on the day of check in."

Please implement this ASAP. 

[Anonymous]

I've had at least 4 instances in which the guest arrived on the day of check in and ultimately chose neither to stay nor to cancel the booking or request a refund. (It sounds odd, but these were short-stay guests booked at low rates). 3 of these occasions were due to the guest having failed to read the listing and grasp that their guestroom is in a shared apartment, and a 4th was the result of an unexpected change in the guest's work itinerary. I didn't ask the guests to take the time to manually cancel, as they weren't getting refunded anyway. But of course I didn't cancel the bookings myself either, because of the penalties involved.

As a result, all 4 of these parties were able to write reviews with no indication that they didn't actually stay here. That's pretty weird.

I do think it should be possible for hosts and guests to be able to review each other when a booking is cancelled after check-in due to a reported and verified problem (for example a misrepresented property or a guest violating rules). However, I think the review process should be different in two ways:

1) Ifn the event of problems, the star ratings are mutually disabled and a disclaimer indicates that the booking was not completed, but both parties may submit text reviews

2) If a guest leaves early without cancelling, reviews and ratings are both disabled

There's also the difficult question of how reviews should work if there's a dispute over payment. Nobody should be able to use reviews to gain unfair leverage in money issues, and the Anti-Extortion policy is not sufficient to deal with that. However, I would certainly want to know if a prospective guest had a history of refund demands or cancellations, so blocking reviews would prevent us from making well-informed decisions in some cases.

[Leslie7]

If you send a message to @Airbnb2 helptbelugh Twitter they will delete the review if the guest didn’t stay. Unfortunately they “claim” they cannot delete any star ratings, so even if the written review is deleted they could still bring your star rating down. I’ve had it happen 2 or 3 times and they have always removed the review. Just make sure you have a message on the thread through the Airbnb platform indicating that the guest did not stay.