Advice - not leaving a review

[Dorthy1]

First time hosting, we’ve had a couple of guests who we do do not want to write feed backs / reviews for. Will this affect our air BnB profile in anyway, in terms of ratings etc?

thanks in advance 

[Joelle43]

Hello @Dorthy1 

Airbnb is one of the few platforms that allow hosts to review guests, which is a really great feature so am wondering why you wouldn't want to review some of your guests?  If they weren't 5* guests then it's really important that you let future hosts know that.  I value that the review is a two sided affair and is what keeps me with Airbnb. 

Guests can't see what marks we leave them for Communication, House Rules and Cleanliness so you should feel confident here at least to mark them accordingly.  They don't see their Overall star award, only your comments in the review itself.  

I have had two guests that sent me a Trip request and the comments left by the previous hosts, saved me from getting my place left in a really poor condition and couldn't thank them enough for being honest.

So will it harm your Airbnb rating?  I couldn't say to be honest but Airbnb do expect us to play ball and with AI now heavily present on the platform, who knows?  Everything we do, and don't do is monitored I'm sure.

If you do have a bad guest, leave it to the last minute to review, although this has become difficult as the countdown seems to have disappeared.

[Greystone0]

Hi @Dorthy1  - yes, the rate at which you write guest reviews affects the guest favorite of 1%, 5%, 10% opportunity. It does not affect the general 'guest favorite' (currently).

We attended a zoom call when guest favorite was first introduced and the AIRBNB person shared this information. She indicated that it was like 80% at that time, but in my opinion, based on how it reacts to my listing, it looks like 100% is required to maintain the "%" ranking, but we do very few transactions here on this platform, so it's probably sensitive to this.

I don't know if this affects search placement as the discussion was solely about this new guest favorite at the time. The current search placement has 100s of data points that affect it and so I would think this could be relevant here as well, but I haven't come across anything via AIRBNB that indicates this either.