superhost status revoked

[George780]

Hello,
I chatted with customer service but there is no mechanism to resolve my issue regarding superhost status changes. I was informed that I lost superhost status and I believe the algorithm used to calculate this is flawed because it gives equal weight to reviews no matter the length of stay. This skews the ratings. Here is an example (not my actual situation): If guest No.1 stays for 11 months and rates me 5 stars and guest No.2 stays for 2 nights and rates me 2 stars, the review from guest No.2 has equal weight to guest No.1 and that is unfair. As a host, we are still required to make sure a long term guest is happy and that review should receive more weight. If not, what's the point of working for 11 months to ensure a 5 star review only to have a bad review from a short term stay undue all the hard work? Surely Airbnb with all it's tech can address this issue in a more comprehensive way. Has anyone had success with having this change reversed? I can only get repetitive non-answers from customer service. And why isn't there an appeal process for this issue?

[Donna519]

Hi George, I agree with you, this makes plenty of sense and Airbnb should include the pro-rata length of stay into their algorithm.

I will bring this up at the next Airbnb seminar I attend.

Hopefully you get your super host status back very shortly.

Happy Hosting

[Sarah977]

@George780  The thing is, that Airbnb isn't really the right platform for 11 month bookings. I think their requirements for number or stays and days is pretty reasonable. It's not that hard to get 10 stays in a year. My listing is quite seasonal, there is only about 6 months of booking season here. And the majority of my guests stay for one to 2 weeks, so it's not like I get hundreds of back-to-back bookings in a year. But I've still managed to get at least 10 in a year and usually more. As it stands now, you just have to not take bookings that are months and months long, opting for more and shorter bookings.

But I do agree that it would be more fair to base the criteria on number of days that you are booked, rather than the number of individual stays. The bottom line is, that Airbnb doesn't value hosts as much who do long-term bookings because they only get to charge their service fee once on those, whereas more individual bookings translates to more service fees for them. And they are all about the money.

[Anonymous]

@George780  One huge problem I can see with this idea is that if a long-term booking takes a turn for the worse at the end of the stay (for example: say you discover some serious damage and make a claim), you don't want a retaliatory review to be weighted so much more than all the positive short-stay reviews.

Either way, the whole concept is too absurd to ever feel fair. It's not as though anyone was a better host last week than they are this week. Best we can do is not take these gimmicks seriously.