What would you do?

[Linda793]

Guest (with zero reviews) checks in circa 8pm (on a 'chilly' San Francisco evening) to her single room. Mentions she has been cold all day and how can she turn on the heat. I explain its central heating for the whole house and comes on when temp drops below a certain temp. I offer her an extra blanket if she needs - she doesn't take me up on it. (I know the bed has very cozy, warm bedding).

I manually turn on the heat a bit later for a short amount of time, thinking of the guest and hoping she is warm. She goes to sleep, I assume. 

Next morning she leaves at 7:30am and shortly thereafter sends me a message saying 'even though the bedroom and bathroom are extremely clean; the room was too humid and the sheets smelled "really bad" and she could not sleep despite being extremely tired.'  She has checked out after one night! (2 night res).

She immediately left me a review when the review opened up and I AM SURE IT IS NEGATIVE !

I am a Superhost - I have had over 300 guests, NO ONE has never given feedback on bad smelling sheets. I smelled them myself - they smell to me between 'nothing -> pleasant' - i use a scent free detergent and 'shea blossom' Scentables.   S

2. The room has a window, which is easily opened and would have allowed airflow and given it was a cool night in SF, it would have cooled it quickly  - the room was probably was TOO WARM for her .  good lord.

Gosh - what do you do with a guest like this in terms of a review - high maintenance guests.   They are lose-lose guests.  You can't please them no matter what. We have all had them.  They give us unfair bad reviews. Airbnb can't do anything.

[Huma0]

@Kelly149 

It's interesting what you reported about the CS rep saying a guest had to consistently get 1* ratings to not be 'recommended by other hosts'. Surely a guest who consistently gets 2* or below should be kicked off the platform, but I wonder what it takes for that to happen? It's not like we can rate them 0*.

I read another post on here where a host said that a CS rep told him that the 'recommended by other hosts' had nothing to do with the star ratings or the 'would host again', but was based on the algorithms picking up key words in the review.

So, if that were true, let's say a host wrote something like this:

"Sue was a nice person and, initially, her correspondence was great. However, she didn't seem to quite understand the house rules and seemed confused by things clearly stated on the listing. We wish her the best, but think she would be better suited to a hotel."

What would the algorithm pick up from that?

"better suited to a hotel"

or

"nice person... correspondence was great... wish her the best..."

??

[Kelly149]

@Huma0  Hmmmm. Who benefits from these things being clear as mud?

[Huma0]

@Linda793 

Not necessarily. Both are important.

As @Gillian166 mentioned, some hosts rate down in the categories but leave a glowing review and then future hosts have no idea what the problem was. For some hosts, it could be something that was not a big deal, i.e. the guest showed up 30 minutes late for check in, but for the host that offers self check in they really wouldn't care about that. On the other hand, it could be something that this future host could not abide, but how are they to know?

Also, guests do not get to see the ratings hosts leave for them (not at the moment anyway), so if you leave them a nice/generic review and rely solely on the star ratings to mark them down for issues, how is the guest ever to learn that they can't be have like that?

I find that a well worded review can be really telling. I have certainly been alerted about something that would bother me and seen red flags that way. On the other hand, there could be negatives in a review that wouldn't bother me (similar to what I mentioned above). Some hosts prefer guests who are out and about all day and do not use the listing much. Others might be offended if a guest is not friendly enough while staying in their own home and don't say hello/goodbye/exchange niceties. 

A low star rating without a review that goes some way to explaining it can also be pretty useless.