Here I would like to talk about the reviews and rating policy. There are two separate policies regarding review/rating that I wish to address and get feedback on from other hosts.
1. In case of a booking cancellation by guest...In more recent months AirBnB allows the guest and hosts to put in a review and rating even if the reservation was cancelled after a dispute. I have been with AIrBnB for 6 year as a host and I can tell you this was not the case in the past. I have had two situations in the past (last one as recent as 2017). In one case the booking had to be terminated because the guest was not following house rules. In the second case (2015), the guest came in and asked for things I could not offer. So they were allowed to cancel. In both cases AirBnB handled the dispute immediately, resolved it and also blocked review by both guest and host. However, earlier this year (2018), when a similar situation happened, AirBnB informed me that they cannot/will not block review by guest or host leaving the host open to being bullied/taken advantage of by guests. This policy affects hosts disproportionally because we depend on these reviews and ratings for our listing to show up on AirBnB search, Superhost classification and hence our income. Guests are not dependent on it for income.
2. Edits to reviews/ratings/responses.... Here are two instances that illustrates the bad policy. I recently had a situation where the guest was very happy with the stay, wrote a good review, but under ratings by mistake put in a 4/5 instead of 5/5. She agreed that it was a mistake and wanted to correct it, but AirBnB would not allow it. I had once written a detailed public response to a false review. However, when I copy/pasted to response to AirBnB and submitted it, the system automatically chopped off parts of it (probably dues to word limitation) and the respnse posted did not make sense. I immediately called AirBnB and asked to edit it. However, I was told that I am not allowed to edit my own response. The only option I had was to either leave the "jibberish" post as is or hide it. Since the reponse posted did not make any sense (sentences were cut off mid-way and multiple sentenses were fused to make no sense) I had no recourse but to "Hide" the reponse. So now I have a false review posted on one of my listings and no response from me. Subsequent to this incident, the bookings on my listings dropped off precipitously and I had to give HUGE discounts to get some booking in. Again, this affected my ability to make an income.
I have been with AIrBnB for 6 years (since 2012) as a host !!! I stayed with them because of the fair manner in which they treated both guests and host.
However, more recently, in the past year I am finding AirBnB has become increasingly unfair and unfriendly to hosts. We offer our home to guests. In this process we make money and so does AirBnB. So this should be a good partnership. It used to be so. But things are changing. There are several policies that AirBnB has put in place that puts hosts at a disadvantage.
In search through the forums I see that there have been several other hosts that have been negatively affected by these policies. I would like to hear from you. I am hoping that if we all collectively make our voices heard, there is (hopefully, keeping my fingers and toes crossed) a possibility that AirBnB might change its policy and make things right.
AirBnB should treat hosts as partners. Please post your experiences here and together lets make our voice heard by AirBnB.
In addition to posting here, also send a FEEDBACK TO AIRBNB. Lets not give up and make our voices heard: Here is the link for feedback directly to AirBnB
https://www.airbnb.com/help/feedback