Lets start again with reviews!

Robin4
Level 10
Mount Barker, Australia

Lets start again with reviews!

For what it is worth I feel like the current review system is doomed because it places too much emphasis on aspects of hosting neither the host or the guest are comfortable with. I feel the star rating system should be abandoned in favour of a percentage system, and If I could have anything to do with the programming this what I feel it should look like.

Leave the fourteen day bit and the other things that keep the review genuine, but do away with the stars.

Firstly the guest review page......

Welcome to the Airbnb review page.png

 

And this would be a typical response that the host would receive.....

Welcome to the Airbnb review page 2.png

 

And this would be the hosts review page of the guest........

Welcome to the Airbnb review page 3.png

Everything is there without having to fight for stars that bare no relationship to the actual experience. Hosts and guests just want to know what the chance is of having a good experience or a negative one and percentages are the best pointer to that.

It's just a first thought but how do others feel about this?

Cheers.....Rob

3 Replies 3
Branka-and-Silvia0
Level 10
Zagreb, Croatia

Before we start hosting (a year ago) I browsed through booking.com and Airbnb.com. The first thing I noticed is that reviews at Airbnb were much better and nicer than at booking.com

 

My first impression and conclusion (as a totaly inexperienced user) was that Airbnb has to be much better place than booking.com because listings are much better quality , guests are better and more open minded ... and everyone is more satisfied at Airbnb. 

 

So, I listed my place on both booking and  Airbnb and, soon enough I also got better reviews on Airbnb. On booking.com guests were just nitpicking about silly things.

When I looked closer I've seen that booking.com has two fields for guests to fill : positives and negatives. It is obvious that guest are motivated to fill both fields so they often mention some minor things under negatives just to say something.

  

As a result I delisted my place from booking.com (this was not the only reason but just one of...)

 

So, my conclusion would be that Airbnb system was good one year back and the changes Abb made recently were unnecessarily and will do more harm than good .

 

Maybe there are some ways for improvements but not in a way which stimulates guests to leave a negative review (like on booking.com) or to make negative reviews more visible (like recently on Airbnb)

 

 

 

 

 

@Branka-and-Silvia0

Yeah Girls, I have used other sites as well, and I do agree Airbnb is the best I have used but, you only have to spend half an hour on this forum to see that the star rating system that Airbnb uses is not popular and when you consider all we see here on this forum is just the very tiniest fraction of Airbnb users, I am sure the overall feeling about this issue must be immense.

Please excuse the 'typos' in those illustrations I put together above. You do something, and you look at it again and again and don't see the bleedin obvious! I don't seem to know where to use 'and' and 'an'!

There was one other major error but I was just hoping to get an idea across....typos and all.

 

Yesterday, we had our first sub 5c morning for this year with a coating of white frost on the ground. It still warmed up to 34c during the day, and today is going to be the same but.....winter is just around the corner.....Yuck!!

Cheers.....Rob

 

And spring is just about to happen here up north, @Robin4

 

Mariann 🙂