I am a Superhost and also a traveler. I recently rented a 3 br condo in Washington, Utah for just one night. Three couples and we needed a place to sleep between Las Vegas and Lake Powell. The condo was sterile, clean, comfortable and quite basic. No real complaints about the space per se. Before arrival the Superhost, let's call her Selby, asked for my personal email address via the Airbnb message platform. She said she needed it to send me a pdf of the house rules. Didn't think much of that (other than she could have had the .pdf in the cloud and sent me a link). After we checked out we had little or no internet connection on our houseboat and so didn't get around to writing a review. But then, within a day of our departure, she sent me not one but two emails, a couple of days apart, basically bribing me to give her a 5 star rating. She asked me to do her a "huge favor" and give her 5 stars because 4 stars might hurt her Superhost status. Then she offered discounts if I came back in the future and most egregiously, she told me she had already reviewed me as a "perfect guest".
This was annoying and alarming to me since a: if she had actually paid any personal attention to my booking, she would have seen I have been a host for 8 years and not sent a remedial, rather condescending explanation of the star rating system. But mostly I was appalled that this was clearly her modus operandi. She gets the private email for a semi-valid reason, then AUTOMATICALLY generates boilerplate emails to coerce the guest into a favorable review.
I called Airbnb Support and they showed very little interest and I had to push them on whether they wanted to have behavior like this reported or not. They finally said, "yeah, you can report the listing". But what I really wanted to do was to provide Airbnb Support with copies of the emails since they are smoking guns.
I also checked some of Selby's other reviews of past guests and they are EXACTLY the same as the review I got. Boilerplate and probably automatically generated since she uses a website called Guesty.com.
Had she not shown such bad taste and leaned on me, and never contacted me to push for the rating, I would have given her a 5 just because the place met our needs. But as a result of her actions, I gave a 3 overall and 1 for communications. The only real gripe about the space was that she demanded that the towels and ONLY the white towels, be put into the washer... BEFORE 10 AM! One has to wonder where the $150 for cleaning is spent on this rather small condo that was used by us for less than 12 hours.
What do people think? Should Airbnb revisit her Superhost status? It sure seems like that kind of behavior which is explicitly mentioned as unacceptable in the TOS, should have consequences.
