Hello Fellow AirBnb hosts,
I'd like to see a star ratings system for guests. If guests can review us as hosts, why can't we review them as guests? It would be great if we could work together as a community to give feedback on who we actually want staying in our homes and properties. The existing "you can't see what a guest said until you leave your own review" system is very broken for many reasons. The star ratings for hosts are painfully important to hosts; why can't they be just as important to guests? Hosts can be suspended if your rating drops below 4 stars.
So guests have a weapon they can wield to bilk hosts out free extras, unwarranted refunds, etc. all in the fear of a bad review. But if hosts had that same weapon, it would level the playing field. We'd no longer get threats of 1 star reviews because a guest wants hundreds of dollars for minor inconveniences, because hosts could point that out in their review that guest and give them a 1 star rating in return. And no host would accept a reservation from a poorly rated guest. So guests would have to return to being reasonable again as would want to be highly rated as well. And we'd want the ability to rate guests at any time; not just in a small window after the guest checks out. We've all had guests with whom we thought everything went well, and then the guest leaves a negative review with a low start rating for things out of our control or things that are unwarranted. I'd sure want to know if that happened to a fellow host, and then I could avoid renting to that guest. But we'd have to be able to rate that guest for any amount of time after their departure. This would make guests more reasonable and would give invaluable information to us as to who we want to allow into our homes. There are, of course, times when a guest isn't treated right, and they certainly have all the tools at their disposal to make that known. But I think we are tired of working our butts off for guests and doing everything right, and then being threatened or slammed by a low star rating review. Like the time you engaged with a guest, made their stay great, and then get a low star review because they didn't like the cleaning fee; which they knew about when they booked and agreed to. And they only made a stink about it after there was nothing that could be done; after check out. I'm sure we all have a hundred stories about guests that we did everything for, and then they stuck us with a low star review. And there is nothing we can do about as it's after the fact.
Please let us all review our guests on a 1-5 star basis at any time. And let us adjust our booking requirements to only accept guests with a certain rating. Just like guests do to us. If I was able to let everyone know about the bad guest who complains about fees after checkout, wouldn't everyone want to avoid renting to that guest? But our hands are tied thanks to Airbnb's poor executed tit for tat system where you only get a small window of time to review a guest, and can only see what someone wrote after the fact. And there is no star system for guests, so there is no way to easily sort bad guests out. I don't want your bad guest that asked for a $1000 refund because the AC wasn't set at 72 degrees on arrival, and you don't want my bad guest that left a bad review because they didn't pull up the detailed map that was sent to them and got lost using MapQuest (who uses MapQuest anymore?) Thoughts?