Put Reviews back in chronological order to reflect listing development

Put Reviews back in chronological order to reflect listing development

Mixing old and new reviews is confusing, and as a guest I would want to see latest and up-to-date reviews, because that's the situation going on right now.

Old reviews may reflect something good or bad that might not even be relevant anymore!!!!!

 



 

Response from Airbnb

We agree that older reviews may not reflect current reality as you continue improving your listing and your hosting skills, often based on guest feedback. However, our research has shown that displaying reviews from guests of the same language and country leads to more bookings, and we want you to get as many bookings as possible.

 

The reviews that a guest sees on your listing are prioritized first by the guest’s native language and country, and second by chronological order. In some cases, older reviews may appear above more recent ones that aren’t in the guest’s native language or from the guest’s home country.

 

67 Comments
Richard631
Level 2

I completely agree with all the comments here; please just put reviews in the order of the bookings, most recent first.  As far as I'm concerned your theory that language order makes more bookings is just plain wrong.  When I'm looking to book I like to see that the place is busy and getting lots of recent good reviews.  The current system is very misleading, for example on one of our listings it shows only two reviews from last month on the first page, but there are eight there really.

 

Perhaps the solution is to decline foreign bookings?  I don't really want to do that.

Jasvinder0
Level 2
This is insane that hosts from all over the world have been complaining at the top of their voice and nobody from team Airbnb has got up and listened? OK here's what I did: I left my thoughts on "Contact us" I than called up Airbnb India on 0008004405103 (this appears a toll free no and maybe can work for hosts elsewhere too) A nice lady listened to me as I spoke and has promised to make some noise and escalate the same. Has told me to reflect my thoughts again on the feed back form that she sends me, which I surely will. Fingers crossed! Will keep the community posted on the results.
Adam-and-Carol0
Level 2

I agree with this as well. Reviews should be in order. For example, we got a bad review a couple times because of an uncomfortable mattress. We've since replaced the offending mattress, so it wouldn't make any sense to have that review ahead of ones from guests who's slept on the new mattress. It gives new potential guests the wrong impression unless they notice the dates on the reviews.

I don't know what airbnb is thinking but no other ecommerce site would ever think of sorting their reveiws this way, unless reviews could be 'liked'. Then you can sort them based on popularity or usefulness. 

 

Kumari3
Level 7

Your rationale (Airbnb) doesn't cut it. WHEN will you atually listen to the community? Where is Brian Chesky when we need him? 

Kumari3
Level 7

The only option left to me is to decline/cancel overseas bookings, which is my biggest source of bookings. Funny, isn't it, as Arbnb CLAIMS that we get MORE bookings this way. This is bizarre. I am not getting local bookings because of this. Because my listing looks as if it is unpopular because the latest reviews are COMPLETELY OUTDATED. Potential guests question why this is the case and move on...........

Sandra126
Level 10

How about adding a ''sort by date'' option? Tick box, and the reviews are chronological.

Otherwise, we get winter reviews like ''house was really warm'' (complimentary) showing in summer (not so good), we may get comments about problems which have been fixed many years ago showing as recent. It is a little clunky.

Anurag4
Level 1

Can you please put back the reviews in chronological order? It's so frustrating to book and look up anything since I start seeing reviews from 1 year ago which is not reflective of the current state of the property. When you have a "translate conversation" button there, how should it matter what language and country the person gave the review in? I think your "research" has a false hypothesis or a very small sample set and you need to put the reviews back in chronologoical order? Or at the very least put a self serve setting there for having users select if they would like for airbnb to decide how the reviews should be depicted. Thanks