After hosting over 170 guests with not a single poor review, I got my first negative review last week. Unfortunately the guest was not happy with the cleaning fee and claimed that it would have taken 15 minutes at most to get my apartment ready for the next guest. I don't need to tell you all how ridiculous this is.
The guest questioned the fee before securing the booking where I explained the service it covered and he still chose to book my apartment.
He was clearly upset about having to pay for cleaning enough so that he chose to do his best to discredit me where ever he could claiming :
- "The apartment is an accident waiting to happen" Because it has two steps in it.
- "The phone number provided was wrong" It wasn't and this was confirmed by Airbnb.
- "There was only one teaspoon for two people" There was 4, if he had of looked in the other drawers
He then took to having a go at my cleaner and how she clearly lacked thoroughness and attention to detail because she did not notice there was only one spoon.
I spoke to Airbnb's customer service and outlined the comments in the review that were untrue and therefore in violation of the content policy, one line in the policy in particular outlining a violation that reads,
"Reviews that do not represent the author’s personal experience or that of their travel companions"
My logic was that anything that is untruthful does not "represent the author's personal experience" but I was soon very surprised and disappointed by the lengths that Airbnb customer support will go to twist the fact and make excuses for the guest in order to ensure their reviews are not removed.
The first support member I spoke to was fairly reasonable but I was shocked when she said:
"As much as I want to, if only I have the capability to do this for you without risking my job, I have already removed this by all means"
This support member was soon replaced with one that was perhaps better at making excuses not to remove the review. Although she admitted that one of the comments was incorrect, she claimed that because it wasn't obvious to other readers that it was false, it was ok. These are her words:
"Their review mentioned "phone number provided was not correct". Both of us is aware there is only one number listed. The review did not mentioned the "listed" number on the listing was incorrect. If the guests has mentioned the listed number was incorrect, then it can be a violation."
It is very concerning that the support staff go to such lengths to prevent reviews being removed, even when by their own admission the statements are incorrect. Even more concerning is that at least one of them fear the will lose their jobs if they remove reviews.
This started me thinking as to why they would do this. Surely they want to support their hosts and ensure that all reviews were honest and fair. They have policies in place to ensure it after all.
It dawned on me that Airbnb have a lot more guests than they do hosts, and they make a lot more money from guests than they do from hosts as they charge them a larger percentage of the booking fee. If you look at it like a business, the guests are the customers and we are simply the suppliers. It is in their best interest to protect their customers over their suppliers.
It appears that we are likely to be stuck with any negative reviews unless they are so clearly over the top wrong which is disappointing.
As hosts we expect that if we do a good job, our guests will write honest reviews. Sometimes this just doesn't happen and our guests let us down and fail to meet this expectation.
I understand why we can't see reviews until after both parties have written them but it is not unusual for a host to have a different view once the review has been left. When this happens we can say our review is in violation of the content policy as it doesn't represent our experience of that guest and we can have it removed.
Unfortunately you can't go back and write an honest review of that guest, but you can make sure those undeserved 5 star reviews are removed.
