Renewing Super Host status

[Katrin14]

It does seem a little unfair for otherwise excellent hosts with satisfied guests to have one disgruntled Guest (there's always somebody you can't please no matter what - and yes, I have had those I've bent over backwards for give me less than perfect reviews too) who spoils your average with very poor reviews.

Why not adopt the same system they have in the Olympic skating system and drop the lowest and the highest before averaging? 

[Ned-And-Laura0]

Imagine if you are a guest and had a really bad experience from a bad host and decided to take the only course available to you and leave a bad review, only to see the admin remove or hide it. As with any review system they only work if they give everybody complete and total freedom to say what they honestly feel.  The moment they get caught trying to control reviews in anyway the value of the entire system goes out the window.  Of course anything deemed fake or incorrect they can take steps to remove them, but only in extreme cases in my experience.  It would be great for us as hosts if they would be more liberal in removing what we feel are inappropriately bad reviews but in my experience they don't do this. They do need to be careful in this regard, Yelp got caught with their hands in the cookie jar by manipulating bad reviews for paying advertisers and the value of the entire brand went down the toilet.  I don't even use Yelp anymore because of this.  

[Gillian19]

@Ned-And-Laura0@Katrin14 Some excellent thoughts - adding mine. I believe all reviews should stay. even if they are unfair. Ratings should stay as well. If Airbnb would just stop sending threatening emails about suspending hosts with 'low' ratings -  although no sane person would say 94% is remotely low and dropped the whole superhost thing, life would be a lot less stressful fo hosts. So what if a property rates less than some magical number thought up by someone who has never hosted a bean in their life? The guests have full visibility of the ratings and reviews and can chose to stay there or not. Why does Airbnb feel the need to protect guests - they are adults. Let them make their own decisions and live with the consequences.

[Sarah977]

Yes, if they did away with the threats to delist just because hosts had an average of less than 4.7, the reviews wouldn't be an issue- if a host has 25-100 great reviews and one "off" one, it should be pretty easy for most people to figure out who is telling the truth. And there does need to be some point at which a terrible host is delisted, but 4.7? When they tell the guests that 4 means good? That's absurd.