Agreed. Small sample size, but my wife used airbnb twice in london. First time was good (not great, but good). Second was horrible. (no curtain on windows directly facing office buildings, broken shower, no tv, 2 hangers for a 10 day booked stay, etc). Video evidence for everything, and multi-day delays in getting resolutions (everything documented via their platform). Requested a partial refund (no working shower for 4 days?) Response was a resounding no, then threats from the person who was doing the renting that they would post negative reviews of my wife as a renter so no one would rent from us again. Guess what? The owner (and his girlfriend) had several airbnb properties they were renting out, growing a landlording business (without all the pesky regulation). (edit: there were multiple reviews stating how great it was - it was a veritable dump - which is partially ok, but broken shower, no tv, etc - when those are clearly listed amenities - is simply lying. Oh, and if you're going to rent out a room/place via airbnb, please remove moldy/stale food from your refrigerator first)
Contrasting that with a recent nashville visit via airbnb (I didn't book it, but stayed there) - the epitome of the "share my home" aspect that gets played up - notes around the house, everything fresh and tidy, etc).
Forcing just 1 would certainly get back to the roots. Or perhaps a sliding scale - fees go up as you want to list more rooms? The individuals wanting to rent out a spare room get the cheapest fees - the people trying to be the next hilton (sans service and regulation) pay correspondingly higher fees).
I wonder what controls they have to prevent someone who gets dinged with bad ratings (as a landlord) from reposting the same exact property. After all it would be trivial to post with an address and unit "1705a" and then if a problem just call it "1705b" with different pictures as if it's a completely new listing (and curious if that much effort is actually needed). Likewise landlords (I am a commercial landlord) often have various entities that they use so it's easy to come up with a new "owner" of the unit. I wonder if Airbnb even cross refs ownership with city records at all.
One question I haven't seen to be raised often is how the reviews are "regulated" by airbnb.
I rented an apartment in a metropolitan city via airbnb last year. Both the owner and the apartment got about ~15 excellent reviews. It turned out the owner was very indeed very nice and friendly, but the apartment was far from both the description and the reviews. Our friends living in the city was astound since the price we paid should get us a much better deal than that.
It made me wonder if 1) the reviews were "regulated" or "engineered" somehow, 2) due to the two-way review system, renters were reluctant to write a bad review since they were concerned they could get retaliated by the owners giving them bad reviews in response.
due to the two-way review system, renters were reluctant to write a bad review since they were concerned they could get retaliated by the owners giving them bad reviews in response
This, I think, is important. Both the renter and the landlord have to write a review before both reviews appear on the website. And the review content of the other party is not known to you until you post your own. So, basically, we know when the renter is "problematic" - has a lot of complaints, is constantly unhappy etc. We generally don't leave a review for such person. This is probably not the best approach from an ethical point of view, but yes - we do not want to know what this "problematic" guest may write about us.
So, if I don't write a review, the other party's review won't get posted either? This misuse can be prevented by implementing a deadline for submitting review and beyond that, whoever submitted theirs gets posted. So even if you forfeit your review, it still wont prevent the other party's bad review from getting posted
So, if I don't write a review, the other party's review won't get posted either?
Yes, I'm quite sure that's how it works currently. There is a deadline, which is 14 days, and also you are notified when the other side posts a review. The message says something along the lines "X just posted a review, you need to post a review for both of your reviews to become public". And you also can't see what the other side wrote until you post yours.
There is also place for "private feedback" in the review, so of course it is possible to leave a good review, but send a bunch of complaints or suggestions that are only visible to the person you are reviewing.
Haven't used AirBnB so I don't know about the review mechanism but isn't it blind? For example, if i remember correctly, on Freelancer.com, you cant see the other party's review until you submit yours. The reviews only get posted once both parties have submitted theirs. Isn't this the same for AirBnB? If not, wouldn't implementing this resolve the issue?
Side note: You can implement a deadline for submitting review to avoid misuse where someone doesn't submit their own review in order to prevent a bad review from getting posted on their profile
> Response was a resounding no, then threats from the person who was doing the renting that they would post negative reviews of my wife as a renter so no one would rent from us again.
Umm, are you sure? You can leave reviews only if you actually rent from someone. It's not like Yelp, where anyone can write reviews for any place. On AirBnB, the actual rental transaction has to happen.
Secondly: you don't see each other's reviews until after the review period has closed. So you could leave a negative review, but the owner would not see it until their time to review has passed.
yes, I'm sure. "you post a negative review of us, we'll say XYZ about you" XYZ being completely not true, but unprovable. We had vids/pics and contradictory email messages, which should be proof enough of fraud, but what they threatened to write was pretty bad. One neg review against them - with multiple dozens - could be ignored as "meh" whereas one against my wife would have been 1 out of 2 (actually, not sure she had a first one from the year before) and would probably have hurt her chances of people renting to her in the future.
So... - hey, airbnb, great job. You've made it much easier to just not use you at all. Yes, we're a small one-off exception. Fine. I bet there's a whole lot more of these exceptions that are unknowable because there's little recourse to escalate your case. We possibly could have taken this up to the credit card company, but IIRC there were some mediation clauses in our terms of service which I thought at the time meant we couldn't.
The 'resounding no' justification was "well, you decided to stay there the whole time, it couldn't have been that bad".
Hrmm... we paid up front, and told us to try to work things out - even after sending in pictures/videos of non-working stuff. How do you walk away from having splashed out $2k already, then try to find another place in the middle of a trip, with no guarantee you'll see a dime of this back? $100 reduction, while symbolic only, would still have been symbolic enough for me to not have such a bitter/negative experience that I'm talking about years later.
It's an empty threat. They can't see your review until they have left their review or the time is up to leave a review. So you can say you won't give a negative review but give one anyway.
At the risk of repeating myself: you cannot see the other party's review until you have left your own! So they won't know what kind of review you left until either (a) the time window of reviewing closes, or (b) they have submitted their review. So there is ZERO chance of them knowing that you left a bad review before writing theirs. ZERO.
I have to shout now: THEY DO NOT KNOW IF YOU REVIEWED THEM OR NOT! You have a time window to review; after the window closes, you can see their review (if they reviewed), and they can see yours (if you did). UNTIL THE WINDOW CLOSES, BOTH SIDES ARE BLIND.
Contrasting that with a recent nashville visit via airbnb (I didn't book it, but stayed there) - the epitome of the "share my home" aspect that gets played up - notes around the house, everything fresh and tidy, etc).
Forcing just 1 would certainly get back to the roots. Or perhaps a sliding scale - fees go up as you want to list more rooms? The individuals wanting to rent out a spare room get the cheapest fees - the people trying to be the next hilton (sans service and regulation) pay correspondingly higher fees).