Discriminative Airbnb policy towards hosts in case of unfair/flawed reviews

Ivan451
Level 3
Moscow, Russia

Discriminative Airbnb policy towards hosts in case of unfair/flawed reviews

So I recently found myself in a peculiar bureaucratic trap. Long stoty short: if a guest leaves a positive text review but rates you 1 (one) star for literaty no reason (i.e. by mistake), the only thing you get from the company is a few condolescences. So if there was no text and low rating, I could challenge this. If it was offensive or contained false information, I could challenge this. But if a guests says something like "very pleasant stay, beautiful house, with a magnificent environment" and gives you the lowest possible rating, the only thing you can do is to write a public responce and go beg the guest to discard the review completely. Because it doesn't violate any Airbnb rules!
A guest can leave you any rating and it won't be reviewed no matter how unfair it is, even if you're a serial superhost with examplary reputation and no negative reviews in all time, even if the review itself totally contradicts the rating. But you surely will receive a politely unnerving email from Airbnb telling you to "focus on delivering the best experience possible for future guests to keep your listing active in search"This is so awesome I actually made my first post on the community about this. Brilliant job, Airbnb team, that's truly an expiring hosting experience (not really).

31 Replies 31

Thankfully, Airbnb blocked the listings based on geography, not the host's origin, and mine are in Greece.
Yes, I'll defenitely lose my superhost status as the assesment is in early July and I don't have many stays until that, June's still considered low season here. I did contact the guest but I've yet to recieve any answer from them, and honestly, I'm not sure if they even bother to read the message. It's ridiculous that I have to count on it on such a technologically advanced platform as Airbnb, especially with their rating policy when less than 4.5* means you're almost on the bottom.

@Ivan451 CS is useless when you tried to remove a review, good or bad, logical or not. I used my superhost coupon to reserved a ukraine house in March (but not stay) and the host wrote me a review "Thank you! Z. XXX" which includes my last name. I really don't like my last name displayed, but I don't want to bother the host. So I messaged CS to ask the review to be removed. I thought it should be easy since it's a good review and no bother to other people at all. But turn out they won't do that. I even called but seems they understand it but still insist "since it does not against any airbnb rule, it can't be removed". In the end, I messaged the host and host apologized and removed the review in a few hours.