We are new to AirBnB and had a nice streak of excellent guests until we rented to a very young man without reviews.
He turned our home into a frat party house! He brought in extra guests (we caught him on camera) and huge amounts of alcohol, smoked behind the house, damaged our new jacuzzi, broke a door screen and then stole robes and towels…etc
At the end of his stay he said he really liked the house and would like to return, however, after we confronted him about the stolen items he got angry and left a lengthy malicious 2 star review full of lies.
We have asked AirBnB customer service 5 times to please remove his review to no avail, and each time they come back with the SAME cookie cutter reply: “his review does not violate the AirBnB review guide lines”
What we don’t understand is the narrow-minded AirBnB policy of ONLY looking at how a Guest WRITES rather than how a guest BEHAVES in our homes.
We have an excellent 5 star track record with our guests and as you all know, a lot of effort goes into that. We work really hard and strived to offer a top notch product to our guests and to AirBnB.
This particular guest has contributed NOTHING to the AirBnB community and yet his revenge review is allowed to stand.
The obvious question is: why is AirBnB not looking at the entire picture with some perspective, taking into consideration both parties’ track record, and they only make a call on whether somebody writes within their set guidelines??
Are we to believe that guests can break the house rules and vandalize our property but if they “write pretty” they are off the hook and there are no consequences for their behavior?!
We feel we brought value to the AirBnB experience, but someone who has done nothing is allowed to negatively impact our ability to rent our property going forward. How does that help us or anybody in case?
Airbnb needs to review this policy and do better. As hosts, we don’t feel supported or appreciated in this “partnership”. We have one more (return) guest and after that we will take down our listing unfortunately.
Thank you for reading.