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Comment by SLWW | Hacker News Reader

I learned back in 2008 that you never, ever attach a review to your real name.

Any review, negative or neutral, runs the risk of damaging AirBnB, too many negative reviews might have the effect where AirBnB has to address the allegations, when it's much easier to just keep making money off of the bad host and ignoring negative experiences.

I feel less likely to rent an AirBnB because of this article, simply by the fact that there is more than one negative review placed off-site.

They don't want to deal with it; you are just a number, always have been. DO NOT post negative reviews with your real name

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AirBnb seem to have a different policy now: they simply delete the bad reviews. In June I had my first bad experience. The owner was nice but the property was absolutely awful (yet it was a "superhost" with glowing reviews).

I left a bad review (my first). Two days later I received a convoluted message from support, telling me that my review was incorrect and wouldn't be published, because it pointed out "things the property owner couldn't change".

This is sinister, but funny at the same time. If the property is dirty it can be cleaned. But if, for example, it has walls so thin you can hear the neighbors breathing, or the slope of the bathroom is in the wrong direction and water flows into the bedroom every time one takes a shower, you can't say that in a review! Because it "can't be changed".

I learned from that experience that AirBnb reviews can't be trusted, and "superhost" doesn't mean anything (except the power to kill bad reviews).

I haven't been to an AirBnb since; the best properties are very often on Booking.com as well, and those which aren't, are questionable.

It's such a shame how short-sighted profit motives ruin everything.

User reviews are such a wonderful thing -- until companies figured out it's more profitable to hide negative reviews and just sell people crappy products.

Booking.com is the worst in my experience, and it makes me sad to hear that Airbnb isjust as bad...

Since Airbnb couldn't verify my credit card due to technical reasons, I started using Booking a lot (with the same card - no problem whatsoever), and it was a pretty good experience. Why do you think this way about Booking?

What's your minimal rating when you book? I found out that anything lower than 8/10 is really bad on Booking, which was counterintuitive to me.

Sounds like video game reviews. Anything lower than an 7/10 is considered bad.

As an example, Aliens Colonial Marines[1] was literally unplayable, filled with bugs, and generally got a 48/100. To me that should be a middling game not literal unplayable garbage.

1. https://www.pcgamer.com/aliens-colonial-marines-review/

Reviews are not representative.

You want to look for new reviews (fake reviewers are active in waves, only for as long as they are paid), even if they are bad, read them and see what people dislike.

The only way to warn others without risking your account is by posting a reasonably high rating and a seemingly positive review that obscures how horrible the place is.

"Convenient if you drive a car, otherwise you'll want to rely on cabs since walking one way might take 30+ minutes. Lovely staff, make sure to ask about reception hours since they may not always be as advertised. Perfect bed if you like a hard mattress and aren't too tall (say less than 6 ft). Got a bit itchy in the morning, probably my skin allergies. Some roach sightings but they are everywhere in this price range right?"

This will stand out among all the paid 5 star reviews with two words and three grammatical errors.

48/100 is an F.

Yes! Does Booking give stars on a curve? Because there is some serious ratings inflation happening. I once stayed in a 6/10 “room” in Spain and it was just a walk-in closet with a cot. And calling it a walk-in closet is generous. It was really more like a walk-in closet sized shed or garage that had been tacked onto the side of the house. Picture the back door of a house that when you open the door that should lead outside you instead enter a generic Home Depot type shed that has had its doors removed and been nailed to the side of the house. It was only marginally better than sleeping in a cardboard box. No one in their right mind would ever rate this “room” more than 1/10 but somehow on booking.com it was a 6??

True, but so what? Just book rooms with a minimal review average of (i'd say) 7.5 and up.

The good thing about booking.com reviews is that you must have to have stayed at a property to leave a review.

Sure, that can also be gamed, but the risk is significantly lower that a review is outright dodgy.

Realistically, this is how every rating system I've ever come across works. On a 10 point scale, you avoid anything under a 7.5. this applies to even unfiltered public ratings, so I assume it's an attribute of how human apply numeric opinion scoring.

7/10 on Zomato is pretty good though, whereas a 3.5/5 Google review suggests "stay away unless desperate". But I agree there's no system where 5/10 means "average". I suspect it does relate to our time in educational institutions where a 50% mark is really the worst possible score you ever want to consider.

I used to have access to a large set of hotel review data. The median score on Booking was 8.1 (if you filter for business travelers it's in the 7s, but I'm not sure if that's available in the UI). This is partly because the scale is actually from 2.5-10, not 1-10 or 0-10 as you might expect. The rest is probably just because people don't evenly distribute ratings and tend to favor the top and bottom of the scale.

They ask you what was good about the hotel, and what was bad, and then they show only the good part of the review to others.

I always see both parts on the review

If you click through to the detailed reviews you can see both parts. But on some screens they show just the positive part.

I have at least one example of Airbnb ignoring a bad review. I had a pretty bad experience in Washington DC once and left a review to warn future guests. To my surprise such review never came online. I checked for several weeks after and saw new reviews popping up on the same property but my review was nowhere. I still use Airbnb but just lower my expectations by a huge amount because according to them everyone is having a fantastic experience. Just like Instagram... Thanks internet!

I had a situation with Booking a couple years ago where I booked a room that was double booked. It’s kind of the hosts fault, but Booking’s support was completely unhelpful in resolving the situation.

Like GP, had infinitely better experiences in Booking.com than in AirBnB. I'd just rather stay with professional hosts, except in few cases (eg, renting summer stays for larger groups)

Just being on booking.com doesn't guarantee a professional host, though. I booked a small B&B via booking.com and they cancelled an hour before arriving. Or rather, they told me that we couldn't come and instructed us to cancel ourselves. That felt weird and I said I wouldn't do that. What they then did, was to invalidate the creditcard payment.

Luckily I could book another hotel, even though it was holiday season.

They always want you to cancel because that doesn't hurt their metrics. Same with somehow invalidating the credit card payment.

Yeah, the whole thing didn’t sit right with me.

Did you take it up with booking.com?

I'd guess that they would be very unhappy about such behavior and eventually drop the property.

For what it's worth: I booked 100s of stays on booking.com (virtually always hotel rooms) and never ran into an issue.

Yup, called support and after our explanation, they asked whether the host offered us an alternative. I said no, and support would get back to us. Never heard from them again.

Reviews can have objective facts (the AC is broken), but there is a subjective quality to them that has to be calibrated to each person (shabby decor to one person is faded glory to another).

Maybe that’s a good use for AI. It could Calibrate itself to each persons “taste” and filter the world for them. Instead of making users rely on fake metrics like “stars” or hidden clues like the presence/absence of neon lights, or some quality in their logo to signal what type of establishment it is…this signalling/filtering could be done for them virtually.

“It's such a shame how short-sighted profit motives ruin everything.”

Slightly off-topic, but this statement reminds me that it’s not just “profit motives”. I deal with third-party customer services (my clients work with third-party b2c who markets to customers, and my client fulfills the orders) a lot. Each company has a slightly different culture and structure. All have front line customer service for merchants, but it can take months to get through to higher levels of support—if at all.

Front line say yes yes yes but nothing is fixed or remedied. The only obvious recourse is to leave the platform.

Profit, yes. But also structure and roles of employees you are allowed to speak with who have no power for remedy, or incentive to be rational actors.

What do AirBnb do if you just give a host low ratings without actually writing anything in text? Might be a good way around malicious hosts pushing AirBnb to remove all bad reviews due to some technicalities.

It has been a while since I used Airbnb.. they deleted a bad review that I wrote. This is really strange.

At this point I have had enough of this. Trustpilot does this also and tries to conceal it with me not providing enough information.

You'd think that it is somewhat within the owner's control because they could disclose whatever this apparently immutable fact of the property is and then people could reasonably factor this in when deciding whether to stay or not.

But presumably this is not something which is policy because it would lower the price of relevant properties which presumably affects airbnb's revenue as well.

This kind of behaviour should somehow be regulated in a similar way to advertising - if they're intentionally hiding negative information while posing as a place to reliably inform you about your stay based on the experiences of others (which is what "review" implies) then they're misleading you for profit. What they're actually running is a mislabelled testimonials section. It distorts the market by actively preventing people from accurately assessing the property's utility to them.

It is regulated - it’s called zoning. There is a reason many municipalities are banning short term rentals. But AirBnb is not doing anything to make sure the hosts are in compliance and are actively hiding where the places are until after you book.

Can you imagine not being able to find out the exact location of a hotel until you book?

True, but this can actually be circumvented easily. The pointer on the map is at the exact location, all one needs to do is zoom in, and compare with a map that has street names.

It could probably be automated too.

My wife does this for every one we rent. Google street view can be a godsend.

Sure, I’ve done it many times. Sites like priceline.com offer huge discounts if you’re willing to commit to a small area on a map and a general description of the property without knowing the particular hotel until you pay.

As a pretty frequent traveler (business and personal) and even more soon, I’m very particular about the hotel I stay in, the loyalty points and status benefits (neither of which you can get when booking through a portal) add up.

What I was talking about is not really a specific zoning concern, it could potentially be applied to e.g. ecom websites with review sections as well if they're hiding negative reviews for whatever reason.

Customer review removed: “no bathroom only an outhouse” Host states: “disclosed; listing says ‘quaint period facilities provided’”

AirBNB will agree and remove the review.

Everyone these days does it.

Looks like the property count is not infinite, so many of them will accrue negative reviews with time.

So rental companies demonstrate to us they only care about their own livelihood and not about the quality of the product they provide.

Expedia/Hotels.com prevented me from publishing a negative review and made it impossible even to edit it (to supposedly meet their "review guidelines").

I also had terrible experience with Airbnb due to fake host review.

So yeah - just use Booking.com. Most apartments are there anyway.

I could be wrong about this but I think they only post guest reviews of the property once the host has also reviewed the guest. So if the guest leaves a review the host doesn't like then they simply won't post a review for the guest.

The only times I have not received a guest review from a host on AirBnB is when I have left a 4 star review (instead of 5.)

The net result of this is that more properties have more 5 star reviews and so do more guests.

>I left a bad review (my first). Two days later I received a convoluted message from support, telling me that my review was incorrect and wouldn't be published, because it pointed out "things the property owner couldn't change".

I've been shouting that from the rooftops for a couple of years. I discovered that same thing happened to me, but without the support comment above. Then I discovered in the Airbnb subreddit, hosts telling each other that to remove a bad review it's easy, just show something in the review you can't change. Bingo.

You know what, F Airbnb. Anyway the cleaning and service fee add ons make it more expensive than a hotel, and with 0 flexibility to cancel or reschedule.

Yeah it makes sense that hosts would exploit this; but it doesn't make a lot of sense that "things that can't be changed" are the things that can't be talked about in reviews?

As a traveler, it's those things I want to know about. Not whether they did or didn't swipe the floor six months ago...

Noise, location are prime things that are 'outside of host control' and thus need to be censored. Speaking from experience. How about a ground floor apartment with several restaurants' courtyards and back areas adjacent to the windows?

As a customer you're reviewing the overall experience, not the host. Whether or not something can readily be changed by the host (and actually, there's very little a host genuinely can't change - if the location is terrible, they could sell that property and buy another one in a more suitable location!) is irrelevant to potential customers deciding whether a property is suitable for their accommodation. Do AirBnB also remove positive reviews that praise things the hosts can't change?

You're preaching to the choir. We're hammering home how corrupt and unethical the process is with regards to reviews. The logic Airbnb gives is weak, but then logic of profit is stronger: of course they will side with hosts, the moneymaker, and shit on us, the expendable piece of the equation.

I had a host write me a bad review. I challenged it with airbnb team with screenshots and proof, they agreed that review was incorrect but said couldn't do anything because it a policy to not change/delete reviews.

Had a similar experience. Stayed at a 4.9 star superhost place, and the place was terrible. Very cheap and uncomfortable furniture (I had to buy my own pillows in order to sleep), and the place smelled of sewage most of the day for some reason (not due to bad cleaning).

I left a bad review. They just deleted it saying it was against their TOS.

I wonder if they allow positive reviews mentioning things the host can't change. Say the location is great, isn't that unfair to all of their hosts that are in less ideal places?

I wonder if their review system is just biased towards the user with more activity. When I first signed up for airbnb 2 years ago as a host, I didn't know what I was doing and accidentally allowed the default option of instant bookings, which means you just automatically accept what ever booking comes your way. So of course the next day someone booked the place at 3am in the morning, which wasn't going to work because we still had tenants there for another week. I had to cancel. And the person I cancelled on left a wonderfully concise review.

"Cancelled day-of booking"

I thought this was true, but disingenuous because I had also cancelled the day it was booked, but airbnb refused to intervene. I ended up creating a new account.

“Cancelled day-of booking” is an automated review left by Airbnb, that’s why they didn’t intervene.

Seems it is well past time for a 'Glassdoor for Online Lodging' to take it out-of-band for the online lodging apps.

It'd have to be properly moderated, and vetted for having actually stayed there (automate with Google/Apple timeline?), but it could be very valuable.

This is wise. Bad reviews only serve to make enemies, with nothing positive in return.

> Bad reviews only serve to make enemies, with nothing positive in return.

How about warning other customers?

Just don't use your real name.

Presumably they meant nothing positive in return to the reviewer.

Except a lot of people find helping others to be a positive thing for themselves.

If you get that feeling out of leaving negative reviews, by all means my comment doesn't intend to detract from that.

It actually takes a fairly high bar for me to leave a negative review of a product or service. But some sellers/providers are just so awful to their customers, you're dang right I enjoy helping other people avoid suffering from a business deal that is certain to be terrible.

I get a positive feeling when others have honestly reviewed a product/service, whether that be positive or negative feedback.

I most certainly do not get a positive feeling when watching someone recommend just keeping your mouth shut because "there's no point leaving a review"

Have Airbnb become the corporate mafia or something?

>recommend just keeping your mouth shut because "there's no point leaving a review"

Did anyone say that? I know I didn't.

The parent I was replying to (and simply to offer clarification on what they might have meant) said:

>This is wise.

In reply to the suggestion of using a fake name to leave a negative review.

>Have Airbnb become the corporate mafia or something?

I'm not sure how this follows from what I commented? I don't have a reply.

You can always try do do the Kant thing for questions like these: Would it be good for you if everybody followed your advice? Compared to the chances of getting fucked for writing a bad review, aren't the chances bigger to get fucked by a bad actor in a world where nobody left bad reviews?

It is simple. If the answer to the question: "How would it be if everybody acted like me?" is "It would be worse", this means you are acting in a way that makes society worse for your own advantage.

It's really unfortunate that this simple principle can't work in real life, just because people's idea of "what is worse" are so different. One has only to look at the very different outlooks people have politically to know the answers to the question "Will this make the world worse?" are going to be wildly different, and some of them downright nonsensical to most people.

A bit pedantic, but that's not really the Kant thing. Kant is a proponent of deontology, which is utterly unconcerned with consequences. His thing was more checking if it would still make logical sense.

That is, when he asks "What if everybody lied?", what he's getting at isn't that it'd suck if you couldn't even ask for the time and get the right answer, but that it'd destroy the concept of truth, and with that what does "lying" even mean?

Kant answered the specific scenario of "What if the Gestapo wants to know if you're hiding any Jews?" (his actual scenario was with a murderer looking for a victim, since Nazis weren't a thing yet), and said that yup, you do not lie, because to him the morality of an action is unrelated to its likely consequences.

This is where the limits of the categorical imperative become apparent.

If there were a fund (assume a spherical, frictionless, voluntary society) that was the only way to feed the hungry, everyone should donate to it. Unfortunately it's set up by an evil game master, and one in ten thousand donations is answered with a bullet to the spine.

Of course the categorical imperative says we should do it anyway. I wouldn't. You wouldn't. Rational defection on bad payoff matrices is correct behavior.

Would it be good for you if everybody followed your advice?

Just to be abundantly clear, I offered no advice. I simply offered a clarification to the comment I replied to, with my assumption of what they meant.

Meh, the 2 seconds of warm fuzzy feeling I get from helping others is nothing in comparison to the risks from making enemies with someone.

And using a fake name is not a great solution because there’s often enough circumstantial data to tie a person to a review, whether that be metadata or even just the content of the review itself.

Writing a review to warn others is like "i scratch your back, you'll scratch mine". There is no imminent benefit for you instantly when leaving negative review, but you benefit when others warn you later.

Quite. This is how systems break down, and is realistically a bit selfish.

Further, the more everyone does honestly review, the more outrage occurs if that process is interfered with. The less acceptable it becomes to maliciously go after an honest review.

The reason we help other people is not because it gives us warm fuzzy feelings. It is because it make the world a better place to live in, not only for the people you help, but also for yourself.

Airbnb should understand this. If no one dares to give bad reviews, there won't be any way to filter out bad hosts, which make people in general have much worse experiences (not to mention attracting more bad hosts), which make people use AirBnb less.

you're a wuss :D I do leave bad reviews if necessary and never got any problems.

Just copy paste a positive review from a bot. It's a win-win, the platform (Airbnb here) and service provider (owner) can't hate you because it's positive, won't harass you for not leaving a review and the other customers aren't fooled if they actually read it because it's obviously fake. Reviewing someone's work is not my job, I'm the customer here.

And by increasing the number of dishonest reviews, you are warning customers that you can't trust user reviews and there's no actual way of having actually verified reviews (e.g. Amazon brushing).

Be a bot. Become one with the dead internet. I don't even know if this comment was written by my hand or by GPT-3. Who am I?

Be passive-aggressive: Get on the most glowing reviews and just copy and paste. It will look absolutely shady and make people think twice before booking.

I rented an airbnb room where the host had forgot to update the pictures since there was now a wood workshop in the room behind a curtain. He was a nice guy, but it turned out to be a negative experience for my girlfriend. I mostly blame myself for not picking a more expensive place, but I still felt like other guests should know that they’re sharing the place with model ships and fishing equipment that aren’t in the pictures. Didn’t try to make enemies; gave five stars with a redeeming comment phrased positively. But clearly a flag for anyone who cares.

I doubt that the host "forgot" to update the pictures...

Right. That’s the polite way of saying it. :)

This is why there is such “grade inflation” in reviews. The way I read reviews is now: - look at the reviews with lowest ratings. They have the most signal (the walls were paper thin and the bathroom was dirty) as opposed to positive reviews (beautiful room in a great location). You can usually tell if the reviewer is being unreasonable. - search for specific negative keywords in the other reviews - “noisy”, “loud”, etc. Often people will leave a five star review but discreetly complain about something.

Be mindful of confirmation bias when searching reviews. Finding 10 reviews mentioning noise might be because it's noisy, or it might be that they have thousands of reviews and a small percentage experienced noise

This is an excellent point! I suppose I could normalize by the number of total reviews. It hasn’t been an issue so far as I am only filtering out cases when there are multiple reports of the same issue, and I care more about eliminating bad options than detecting all good options.

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