I started hosting on AirBnb in October of 2014 in a region that hadn't quite caught on to AirBnb yet. Not long after I started, I easily achieved my Superhost Badge after approx 90 days based on approx 90 days of Superhost stats-Criteria. After 6 months, I maintained my status based on 6 months of that same criteria. The same for 9 months. And the same for a year. Then, after that, my status is based on a rolling one-year window of statistics. All seems great and fair, right?
Actually, not at all. Here's why...
As part of operating legally in my region, and in order to fulfill AirBnb's terms of service, I needed to collect sales and occupancy taxes that hadn't been collected AirBnb at the point of sale. (In my region, this is 10% sales tax and a $2/night occupancy tax.). I added info about these taxes into all of my listings, and started a system of tax collection per the council of AirBnb support reps.
While I found that nearly all of our guests had no problem with this, understanding that taxes are a widespread in the lodging industry, but we found that a small number of guests would react rather unpleasantly -- leaving us a 1-star review with manufactured reverse-engineered complaint, even though during their entire stay they reported having a wonderful time with us, only to turn into monsters once they were reminded of the tax info in our listings.
As a result, after a solid year of Superhost status -- and having the benefit of showing up higher in the search rankings -- we barely missed meeting superhost criteria two quarters ago as our number of 5-star reviews had dipped slightly below the % requirement.
Now we found ourselves demoted in the rankings -- and learned that it was an uphill battle as we were being judged a rolling 1-year window of review stats, while newbies on the block were being judged by another standard -- as little as 90 days worth of reviews. If I were to mess up, the law of averages was against me, and it was much easier for a short-term host to achieve superhost.
Superhost Status is, in effect, a certification process that provides a financial advantage (more sales through higher search rankings). As such, To avoid unfair business practices, a certification providing financial incentives needs to have a baseline set of criteria that is equally applied to all hosts across the board.
These are Fair Business Practices:
* Making New Hosts wait for 1 year to be considered for Superhost status -- then judging all hosts equally using a rolling 1-year window of review statistics.
* Judging all hosts equally on the past 90 days of review statistics.
This is an Unfair Business Practice:
- Judging some hosts using a 90-day basis of Reviews -- and other hosts for 1-year -- in order to award Superhost certification -- providing financial incentives (increased sales due to in teased listing visibility) to hosts with the least experience and providing a financial disincentive to hosts with a long-term commitment to AirBnb as a partner in their business model.
I welcome your comments. Thanks for reading.
