Airbnb Reviews: The Importance of Being Honest

Airbnb Reviews: The Importance of Being Honest

It's natural to feel bad about leaving negative Airbnb reviews, but if we're all polite to everyone, the reviews lose their meaning

My first experience with Airbnb was strange. In 2012, I booked four nights in a beautiful two-story home in San Francisco. It was straight out of the movies, brightly paneled and with pretty white trim, nestled among similarly immaculate houses on a gently rolling street.

The host was a young, single man – let’s call him Steve. I carefully read Airbnb reviews from his former guests, aware that I am sharing a house with a man I have never met. Everyone said Steve was a wonderful host - and he was.

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I felt very comfortable in his beautiful home and used it as a base to visit Yosemite National Park, Napa Valley, the Google campus in Mountain View, the Stanford campus in Palo Alto and of course the impressive sights of San Francisco.

On my last night there, I came home to an empty house. I went to my room which had its own lock and bathroom. I entered and saw that something was wrong. At first I thought some of my things had been moved.

Then I noticed that all the furniture had been replaced: the bed, the desk, the chair, the wardrobe, the dresser, the bedside table, the lamp - everything in my room. Consequently, all my things had been moved from the old furniture to the new: the underwear in the dresser, the bra over the chair, the hairbrush on the desk, the nightwear on the bed. I stood there in silence. It felt like a stunning invasion of privacy.

I checked my phone and then the living room to see if there was an explaining note. Maybe he had a furniture emergency? There was no one there. I slept fitfully that night and left in the morning still in a fog of confusion.

A day later, when Airbnb asked me to review Steve, I was a little lost. I hadn't had a chance to talk to him about what happened and wasn't sure if I should mention it in the review. In the end, I decided that if I were a future guest - especially a woman staying there alone - I would want to know, so I mentioned it as diplomatically as possible.

The next day I received a pleading email from Steve asking me to edit the review and telling me that he had to change furniture that day because it was the only day his brother was available. He said he relied on Airbnb to pay his mortgage and that he had already seen a decline in bookings.

I immediately felt guilty. He was clearly wrong for what he did, but there was no malicious intent. I actually tried to edit the review, but Airbnb didn't allow changes after posting.

Luckily, this experience didn't put me off Airbnb, so I stayed in amazing places like a charming cabin in the Finnish wilderness that has its own sauna...

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…and a beautiful cottage with an open fireplace and a wonderful view of Bergen in Norway…

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But last week came my second bad experience. From the beginning we had divided opinions about the studio in Colombia. It was a 20 minute walk from the city center and we weren't sure if it was safe. A guest reviewer said her taxi driver told her to be careful, but her stay was largely uneventful.

Peter and I had vowed to be more vigilant after leaving the safe shores of the South Pacific, but we went ahead and booked the studio anyway. As it turns out, the neighborhood was more than a little sketchy.

Luckily, despite one or two sticky situations, we escaped unscathed and with all of our possessions. Staying there had been a mistake and we certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but when it came to the review we were hesitant.

You see, the studio itself was perfectly maintained and more importantly, the hosts were wonderful. They were incredibly welcoming, always helpful and full of life and character. We knew we would feel like crap if we warned future guests.

It's natural to feel bad about leaving negative feedback, but if we're all polite to everyone, Airbnb reviews will become less important

And so we left a review extolling the virtues of our hosts with just a subtle nod to the neighborhood's less respectable residents ("take a taxi if you're walking after dark"). It's easy to give a run-down hostel or an overpriced hotel a bad review. Most of the time, the owner is a faceless entity that profits from its subpar facilities.

With Airbnb, however, you meet your hosts face to face and often share your home with them. They meet their partners and families and eat at their table. It's natural to feel bad about leaving them negative feedback, but here's the thing: If we're all polite to everyone, Airbnb reviews lose their meaning.

My advice to other Airbnbers is threefold: First, read between the lines of Airbnb reviews. Are they too short? (If you can't say anything nice, don't you say anything at all?) Do they seem fake? Were they tempered with euphemism and humor?

Second, pay more attention to star ratings. This system allows guests to be more honest since their review is anonymous; it is simply swallowed into the overall average. It only appears once there is a critical mass of reviews, so hosts can't always guess how each guest rated them.

Finally, be as honest as you can bear. You may feel like crap, but trust in the fact that you are contributing to the overall benefit and quality of a product that is, more often than not, just fantastic.

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