'Reputational' Media—Where Yelp Has an Edge Over AirBnB, VRBO, etc.

The author did not book the property through Airbnb. Had he done so, he would have learned what we do in these rare situations. His article missed a couple key points:

1) If a host cancels a reservation on a guest, a default review is generated stating that the host canceled X days before arrival. The guest can modify this auto-generated review if he wants to add color to it.

2) The host is penalized monetarily if he cancels on guests more than once per 90 days. The penalty is $100 if the cancellation is within one week of arrival, otherwise $50. Hosts that repeatedly cancel on guests may be removed from the site.

As a result of these policies, host cancellations are rare. Most occurrences are honest mistakes and not from repeat offenders.

One of the worst travel mishaps is accidentally double-booking a space. This is something that happened with frequency in the old old days - prior to the rise of large hotel chains - often enough that it is a plot device often seen in books and old movies. The protagonist finds they have to quickly arrange another place to stay, hijinks ensue.

Since hotel chains have come along, double-booking has become almost unheard of. They have many identical rooms, they're overbooked counting on people not showing up, as airlines do. But with this slight reversion (people are sick of generic hotels with little character and few amenities; the rush to stay in houses and apartments commences) the nightmare of double-booking is a possibility for the traveler once again.

On reviews via the vacation rental sites: Nobody is happy with the current review system at the vacation rental sites. Nobody. Search the http://community.homeaway.com forums to see the owners' side of this. The owners feel HomeAway is geared far too much toward helping the guests, who aren't the ones paying big bucks to use the site. The guests feel the company isn't allowing their voice to be heard when there's a true problem. As in this instance, good guests find they can't properly review a property. And good owners find they can't stop a wayward review from appearing on the listing they paid a lot of money upfront for. Both ends of this are exploited by the few bad apples - the owners and guests who lie for their own ends.

Yelp's model of reviews, on the other hand, has its own similar problems. Fair reviews by genuinely happy or pissed off customers end up filtered. Unfair, spammy reviews (whether owner plants or one pissed customer writing 12 reviews) don't get filtered. There is no 100% way to get around this. The companies whose websites accept, review, and host these reviews have to do the best they can, and keep working at perfecting the filtering mechanisms.

Having said all that, I think the author has a right to be pissed off. Finding you have no place to stay because the owner made a mistake is a nightmare. And he should be able to say to others looking at the property that the owner made a mistake and double-booked him (but paid him back on the spot - obviously, situations exist where the owner gets snippy and refuses: new level of nightmare). The fact that he can't state this publicly is a fault in HA's review system. But they also have a point - that's all he could say, because all that happened was that his space was double-booked. He didn't actually stay there.

What's the solution? I don't know. In a matter of dispute, a dispute resolution where an agreed upon statement of fact could be posted in the reviews might work. The place this idea would fall down is when dealing with the true psychos - the liars who are out to take your money (on the owning side), the liars who are out to threaten you into giving their money back (on the guest side).

(Edit: Fixed now)

For example, I'm trying to figure out where I want to move next and it's commonplace for high rise apartment buildings to be on Yelp, but now that we're talking about a $25,000 lease rather than a $40 meal, the incentives to play around with the sentiment of the reviews are significant, as well as the potential financial reward for doing so. How can we trust the neutrality of the venue in these circumstances?

A fundamental feature/flaw in the apartment/house rental place is inconsistency. You're dealing with one rental owner by proxy via some listing joint. If you want consistency and reliable reviews, go to the Hilton and check TripAdvisor.

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/hawaiian-beach-vacation-hell-sp...

This behavior on the part of HomeAway (VRBO) is really a natural consequence of their business model. When the property manager is your only customer, it doesn't make sense to post negative reviews.

We're doing things differently at Dwellable, of course.

It seems to me we have a need for a fully independent system of reviews with some kind of social trust metric (maybe degrees of separation) and technical measures to prevent them from being silently unpublished by anyone (maybe signed authentic distributed copies).

Two years ago I tried to organize a ski trip for my then employer (Scribd). VRBO stats: I contacted ~30 places. Only thirteen called back, not even 50%. Of the 13 that responded (over a period of 9 days), many of them had sold the cabin for my desired time but couldn't be arsed to update the availability calendar. I managed to make it happen, but in the future, I can't recommend vrbo; it was an enormous waste of time. For Tahoe, you'd be far better off googling then calling the rental management agencies up there directly, because they at least have their shit together and can give you accurate availability.

Also, VRBO doesn't seem to take any responsibility for accuracy of the advertisements. The sleeps number, a key criterion for group vacations, is almost useless and not consistent across homes: some houses seem to think you'll stack sleeping bags like a jig saw puzzle in the living room.