Long time superhost here. Overall, the platform has been working great for us, but we recently encountered a problem that has caused us a lot of stress. This is honest feedback, and I believe Airbnb and hosts are more successful when the platform is successful.
We have hosted hundred of reservations and thousands of guests. The vast majority of guests have good intentions. When there's a legitimate complaint, we do our best to make it right and voluntarily offer refunds when it is warranted.
But we believe there is a blind spot in Airbnb's review moderation policy that is hurting honest and diligent hosts like us, and holding the platform back a little from being better for everyone.
Airbnb's review moderation policy accounts for explicit extortion and quid pro quo on both sides. Unfortunately, as all experienced hosts know, hosts are sometimes held hostage to an implicit and unstated extortion by the occasional bad faith guest. This happened to us recently, and is causing us a lot of stress. It's unfairly affected our performance and we are concerned we may lose our superhost status, not to mention bookings, because of a couple of spiteful reviews that were unwarranted.
1) A savvy guest can implicitly threaten a negative review by signaling a trivial, petty or otherwise illegitimate complaint. The host will be obliged to offer a refund, even if it is unwarranted out of fear of retaliation (a bad review).
2) Hosts may be fearful of filing legitimate property damage claims due to retaliation or spiteful reviews since untruthful reviews are not moderated according to Airbnb's policy.
This situation may not be commonplace, but an unwarranted 1 star review with unqualified or untruthful comments can have a disproportionately negative impact on performance and take a long time to recover from.
In our case, we had two guests who damaged our property so we filed a claim. Literally within one minute of filing the claim, both guests submitted 1 star reviews and make untruthful claims in their reviews. These reviews are anomalous (we're superhosts for a reason) but they have a big impact on our performance.
A couple of suggestions for @Airbnb to consider:
1) There should be exceptions in the moderation policy for demonstrably untruthful reviews. We are told that review moderators are only able to do a very narrow investigation and look only at the content of the review itself. They have no background or context regarding the reservation. Moderation should take a more comprehensive approach and have all the info before making a decision about moderation. This only seems fair.
2) Automatically suspend, or moderate, reviews for reservations where a property damage claim has been filed. Alternatively, give hosts more time to file claims. Currently, hosts are required to rush to file a claim before the next guest checks in, which in many cases could literally be a few minutes after the damage is reported, leaving no time to investigate properly or explore alternative options.
Thanks!
R&D
cc: @Airbnb