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Comment by ionwake | Hacker News Reader

As a great fan of airbnb having stayed 10 times in Denmark in different ones, I was suddenly burned by a fake review from a first time host ( she got into trouble with her housing association I think ). She destroyed my feedbacks "image" with made up statements in her statement.

After several appeals airbnb did not help at all.

I got so burned that I still don't quite understand whether I was unlucky or failed to reach the right person, but Ive been too taken aback to start again with a new profile.

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Dispute resolution at most marketplace and social media companies is pretty hit or miss in my experience. In general, you're not going to get a big time slice from whatever low-paid customer service rep you get assigned to. Maybe they'll make the right call and maybe they won't but any investigation is going to be pretty cursory.

That's not to say stuff never gets fixed. A few months ago I had a random blog on posting to Twitter. No idea why and they did clear it after a few days. So things got fixed but it was very opaque.

ADDED: And, to be fair, a lot of disputes can be a combination of he said/she said and different expectations. "My cheap Manhattan hotel room is tiny!" You don't say.

The dispute processes make binding arbitration with a third party company seem desireable, and that's saying something.

she got into trouble with her housing association I think

The vast majority of AirBnBs are people violating the terms of their leases and/or making undeclared income. A legal AirBnb is just called... A BnB.

I had another fun experience like that, but triggered by the guest reviews. I booked a place for my parents to stay which suddenly disappeared. All I was told by AirBNB is that the host cancelled and the user nor the place was no longer to be found on the site.

Turns out some other guest reported the host for having a hidden camera (which was really the standard Danish fire alarm). The AirBNB messaging made it out to be the host's fault.

My gf has had two shitty experiences with AirBnB's "community leaders" in response to two completely unjustified reviews of her place. Anybody can just suddenly decide that they had a terrible time and that it's the fault of the property, and AirBnB seems predisposed to take the visitors word for it. If they keep that up they're not going to have any renters.

To be fair though, at least depending upon the details, what is AirBnB is supposed to do? If they remove negative reviews because they're outliers, that sounds like what people accuse Yelp of doing. A lot of complaints can be pretty subjective. It's also pretty common for marketplaces to take the side of buyers in general.

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