Guest bot review?

[Anita993]

I got a booking request from a guest yesterday and wanted to see if anyone else thinks it’s suspicious. 

They’ve been a member since 2014, profile says they love to travel and have been around Europe and Asia and have lots of parts of US to check out, but only has 3 reviews from 2017 - all which seemed to be in Russian and needed to be translated & were very generic sounding messages. 

Their booking request message sounded legit and was well written, their email, ID & phone number are all verified, so I don’t think it’s a scam. But my husband thinks this person may have had bad reviews removed and bought bot generated reviews. Is there such a thing? Anyone else come across something like this?

[Brian2036]

@Anita993 

I think a more likely scenario is that they have been members since 2014 but have generally found it better to book through other platforms.

Actually that describes my personal situation.

When we travel we usually use Booking.com to rent accommodations.

It sounds like these people took a trip to Russia in 2017 and used Airbnb to book, possibly because other platforms were not available there.

Generic reviews often indicate that there were large property management companies involved. Their reviews are generally useless.

 I doubt that anyone would pay for them.

[Brian2036]

@Anita993 

You could just ask them about those reviews in a friendly manner, such as, “I see you booked through Airbnb for your trip to Russia. How did that work out for you? I’m just curious about whether they do things differently there.”

[Debra48]

If you're leery about them, you could always accept the booking contingent upon a security deposit which you will refund if the property is left as found.

[Sarah977]

@Anita993  As others have said, property management companies, or hosts who have a lot of listings and high turnover tend to leave uninformative generic reviews, like "Nice guests" or Great guests!".

 I'm not sure why you think it's weird or suspicious for a guest to have reviews from a few years ago and nothing since. The majority of people iin this world can't afford to travel on a regular basis. They may save up for a trip somewhere and then not go anywhere for years after that.

You can do a little deeper sleuthing by clicking on the hosts' profiles who left those reviews, then when their profile/review page comes up, click on the profile photos of other guests who left them reviews to see if the hosts leave those generic reviews for all their guests.