Review

[Taras11]

How is it that a guest can leave all 5 star reviews in the review breakdown section but their overall experience be less ? The guest should not have the option of selecting anything lower than what they have previously selected. I would like some input on this and hopefully have Airbnb resolve this

[Emiel1]

@Taras11,

Search for "overall rating" in the community and you will find a lot of discussion about this subject, including the recent idea to calculate the "overall experience" from the stars given in the 5 specific categories.

Best regards,

Emiel

[Ben551]

@Emiel1 @Taras11  The problem I have with this, is people don’t have good guidance or examples of what should influence each category. For instance my recent guest, who was horrified to find New Zealand is larger than she expected, found no “box” for that.  So she happily gave us 4 stars for location, value and accuracy as a sort of “scatter gun” approach to making her opinion clear about the entire country being not what she expected.

Thankfully she gave 5 stars overall, but if the system “calculated” that overall star rating from her other choices, I’d be utterly screwed over by an idiot who (unfortunately) can still work out how to book a flight to a foreign country. 

In my opinion they need to have clearer guidance as prompters to guests, against each sub category, so that guests understand where they should be reflecting each aspect of their experience  (including examples of things they should not be reflecting at all!)

I know this is a pointless request on some level though... because of my favourite saying:

If you try to make something idiot proof, someone will just make a better idiot.

[Emilia42]

@Taras11, did you message the guest and ask them how you can improve given their 4 star overall rating? Perhaps it is unrelated to check-in, communication, accuracy, location, cleanliness, or value.