Airbnb order their reviews on our listings according to the visitor's native language, then the visitor's country of residence, then the remaining languages and countries in chronological order. I cannot see the sense in this. Chronological order is a much more potent and useful way to search for a listing.
One of my reviews is from Kara who speaks English, is from the US, who wrote her review in English and yet when I look at my listing her September review is on page 5 of my reviews behind five pages of reviews from NZers ranging back to October LAST YEAR. This is nuts. Guests have to troll through all the reviews from their country of residence in order to find up to date information? Ridiculous.
As a guest I personally wouldn't care what country other guests are from when I read their reviews. The only relevant factors are whether I can understand it or not, how recent the review is and what their experience was. Do all Spanish people experience the world in the same way as each other? Are all Dutch people looking for the same things? This seems to be the implication of organising according to country of residence!
A much better solution is for a guest to able to choose how they want to search. If the experience of other Japanese people is important to a Japanese guest then by all means, let them search for that. In order for the guest to get the best results it would make sense that they were able to define their search how they wanted to- according to a particular language or chronological order or their country of origin. I bet you that most would choose firstly according to a language they understand, followed by chronological order.
I would be very interested to know the thinking of Airbnb behind this. I know this is a matter that has been complained about in Airbnb forums a lot. There are other platforms that will gain business if Airbnb don't listen to the people they are making money from and get on to this with more haste. Could the apparent lack of urgency around this issue possibly be because they make more money from guests than hosts? Or because there are plenty more hosts in the sea? Surely not. Remember Airbnb, without hosts, there are no guests. Right now, Airbnb appears as a faceless, lurching, behemoth organisation that has poor systems in place to deal with real people in a sensible way.
