Airbnb reviews: How important it is to be honest
Airbnb reviews: How important it is to be honest
It is natural to feel bad if you leave negative Airbnb reviews, but if we are all politely to all, the ratings lose their meaning
My first experience with Airbnb was strange. In 2012 I booked four nights in a beautiful two -story house in San Francisco. It was directly from the films, colored colorful and with pretty white decorations, embedded between similarly flawless houses in a gentle hilly street.
The host was a young, single man - let's call him Steve. I carefully read the Airbnb reviews of his former guests because I am aware that I share a house with a man I have never met. Everyone said Steve was a wonderful host - and that was too.
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I felt very comfortable in his beautiful home and used it as a starting point to visit the Yosemite National Park, the Napa Valley, the Google Campus in Mountain View, the Stanford Campus in Palo Alto and of course the impressive sights from San Francisco.
I came home in an empty house last night. I went into my room, which had its own lock and my own bathroom. I entered and saw that something was wrong. At first I thought that some of my things were moved.
Then I noticed that all furniture had been replaced: the bed, desk, the chair, the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, the bedside table, the lamp - everything in my room. As a result, all my things had moved from the old furniture to the new ones: the underwear in the chest of drawers, the bra over the chair, the hairbrush on the desk, the nightwear on the bed. I stood in silence. It felt like a breathtaking violation of privacy.
I checked my phone and then the living room to see if there was an explanatory note. Maybe he had a furniture emergency? There was none. That night I slept restlessly and went in the morning, still in a fog of confusion.
A day later, when Airbnb asked me to evaluate Steve, I was lost. I had no opportunity to talk to him about what had happened and was not sure if I should mention it in the review. In the end I decided that I wanted to know if I was a future guest - especially a woman who stays alone - so I mentioned it as diplomatically as possible.
The next day I received a pleading email from Steve, where he asked me to edit the rating and told me that he had to change furniture that day because this was the only day on which his brother was available. He said that he had rely on Airbnb to pay for his mortgage and that he had already seen a decline in the bookings.I immediately felt guilty. He was clearly wrong with what he had done, but there was no malicious intent. I actually tried to edit the evaluation, but Airbnb did not allow any changes after publication.
Fortunately, this experience did not prevent me from Airbnb, which is why I spent the night in fantastic places such as a charming hut in the Finnish wilderness that has its own sauna ...Alt = “Airbnb-Finnland-Hütte”>
... and a beautiful house with an open fireplace and a wonderful view of Bergen in Norway ...
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But last week my second bad experience came. From the beginning we were shared by the studio in Colombia. It was 20 minutes on foot from the city center and we were not sure if it was safe. A guest critic said her taxi driver told her that she should be careful, but her stay was largely uneventful.
Peter and I had sworn to be more vigilant after we left the safe banks of the South Pacific, but we continued and booked the studio. As it turned out, the neighborhood was more than a little incomplete.
Fortunately, despite one or two delicate situations, we got away with all our possessions. The stay there had been a mistake and we would certainly not recommend it to anyone, but when it came to the assessment, we hesitated.You see that the studio itself was perfectly repaired and what is more important, the hosts were wonderful. They were incredibly hospitable, always helpful and full of life and character. We knew that we would feel shitty if we would warn future guests.
It is natural to feel bad when you leave negative feedback, but when we are all politely to all, the Airbnb reviews lose importance
And so we left a rating in which we praised the virtues of our hosts with just a subtle allusion to the less respectable residents of the quarter ("Take a taxi if you are on foot after dark"). It is easy to give a dilapidated hostel or an overpriced hotel a bad rating. Most of the time, the owner is a faceless unit that benefits from their below -average facilities.
At Airbnb, on the other hand, they meet their hosts face to face and often share their home with them. You meet your partners and families and eat at your table. It is natural to feel bad when you leave negative feedback, but here is: If we are all politely to all, the Airbnb reviews will lose their meaning.
My advice to other Airbnber is triple: First, read between the lines of the Airbnb reviews. Are you too short? (If you can't say anything nice, don't you say anything?) Do you seem feasible? Have they been alleviated with euphemism and humor?
second, pay more attention to the star reviews. This system enables guests to be more honest because their evaluation is anonymous; It is simply swallowed into the overall average. It is only displayed when there is a critical mass of ratings so that hosts cannot always guess how every guest has evaluated them.
After all, be as honest as you can endure. You may feel crappy, but trust in the fact that you contribute to the overall benefit and quality of a product that is usually simply fantastic.Try Airbnb for the first time and save $ 20 on this link on your first trip.
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main picture: dream time
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