Comment by notmarkus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notmarkus | Hacker News Reader

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It's tempting as a host to reject people of a certain type, but the line that I draw isn't on race, gender or religion — it's age.

I've come to find out that older folks — somewhere around 50+ — have been the worst possible guests, with no exceptions so far. They tend to be stingy with their star ratings and leave poor reviews even if they had a perfect experience. They also tend to be much more high-maintenance and not self-sufficient, acting as if they think the Airbnb is a hotel and the host is their concierge or room service.

The cost-benefit ratio doesn't work for me in these cases, so I've been intentionally passing on older people recently and trying to fill my Airbnb with younger folks. I never see age mentioned as a factor for discrimination in articles like these, and it seems that it may not be legislated in the same way that the other factors are.

But it feels like it's the exact same issue, and I'm willingly becoming more and more guilty of it.

I am not in a position to generalize but my worst(and only poor) experience was with an older foreign couple, likely in their 70s. I am usually very hands off with my guests but in this case, I showed them how to use the mirowave to make tea, how to operate the washer/dryer among other things. They acted annoyed through much of the trip but ultimately, I continued helping them because I figured a) I don't really know what it is like to be in their shoes b) these could very well be my parents or heck me, some day.

After the trip, I wasn't expecting a glowing review. But when I got a super negative review, I was pretty bummed.

I think that there is an unwritten rule that people in their 20s and 30s know, that 5 star review is the default unless it was absolute shit. Something which 'olds' don't really get. Which is fair really, because they have the graded option, its just us that perceive it differently. Maybe AirBnB would benefit from a binary system plus comments?

Does AirBnB make it easy to view what ratings people have given? Certainly the history of an individual user provides much more useful, actionable information than any broad trait.

It should be easy for hosts to say they only want people with X reviews where most of them are 4-5 stars. Or a better score that weights it based on the host rating (i.e. if a user's hosts generally get 5 stars, but this user rates them all 3 stars, then it's probably a problem with the user, so avoid.) Perhaps AirBnB doesn't want do to this to avoid putting pressure on renters.

That would be a hugely useful metric for a host, but it actually is difficult to see how a user has rated their past hosts. The only method I know of is: view the user profile and look at their reviews, go to each host who reviewed them, search through their reviews to find the prospective guest. There are two points of failure here: if the guest didn't get reviewed by a host or if they didn't review a host. So when a guest only has 1-3 reviews, which seems to be about the average for older folks, it's hard to paint a picture.

I did reject a guest through this method, though. Their reviews from hosts were actually all very good, but when I read their reviews of their hosts, they contained things like "he was nice enough to give me a ride to the airport when I asked, though the car was a bit cramped."

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