6 ms·

She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

64 points by lxm 3y ago

pierat 3y ago
https://archive.is/a2spO https://archive.is/a2spO
justworkout 3y ago
I'm currently planning a trip to India. I've been to several countries around the world and never worried about reviews too much, but India really seems to align with this story. I'll see hotels with countless 5 star reviews (hundreds or even thousands!) that are overwhelmingly positive and get ready to book. But with one hotel my BS meter got triggered, since it was in a rather dingy seeming part of town but still had thousands of great reviews, the pictures were gorgeous, and it was fairly cheap. Also, the reviews were all written in the same voice. "The owner is a very good sir top number one" style. The low reviews had pictures of holes in the walls, bugs, exposed wires, and dozens of comments of people saying "I don't remember posting it, but this hotel posted a 10/10 review under my name. I think they hacked my account" or "the owner forced me to write a positive review before checking in" kind of stuff. Since then, I've gone back and given a second look at all the hotels I've reserved so far and order reviews by negative first. So many are just fake or coerced reviews. I compared against places I've stayed in the past and I've seen no such thing. Delhi, in particular, seems overwhelmingly fraudulent and with owners openly getting pissed if you don't leave positive reviews. Small towns in India seem like they're probably okay (guests posting smiling selfies around the hotel and nothing overtly suspicious or anything), but I'm definitely feeling anxious about my upcoming trip. Then there's the famous case where Thailand tried to arrest a man for a not positive review: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/29/american-wesley-barnes-faces-prison-thailand-bad-hotel-review https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/29/american-wesle...
- gnicholas 3y ago
  > Since then, I've gone back and given a second look at all the hotels I've reserved so far and order reviews by negative first. So many are just fake or coerced reviews. Of course, there's also a risk of fake negative reviews, from competitors.
  - justworkout 3y ago
    That's something I've definitely worried about and seen some people mention in reviews around India. I mostly try to identify the voice of the comment writer. If they're from America but talking in odd English with a 10/10 review, I doubt it's real. Same if it's 1/10 from America and written with strange grammar.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      Sadly, generative AI will probably render this clever heuristic ineffective (at least at savvier establishments).
      - paradox460 3y ago
        Just look for the review to summarize what it said at the end
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        Society is very good at adapting to such things. It will be an arms race for sure, but I don't think there is going to be a crisis of people being suckered by AI generated reviews. If it gets bad enough people will just stop giving them any weight at all, or even treat a lot of good reviews that are well written as suspicious. Then we will find some other way to find out quality of goods and services which will then be gamed at a greater and greater level until that too becomes unusable.
- alejo 3y ago
  One strategy I use is to focus on negative reviews. Read as many and see what things they are complaining about. Something you can see patterns of petty complains, and other times you can detect bigger issues that may make you look elsewhere instead
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    FWIW this works with American hotels, too. Some bad reviews are normal. Lots of bad reviews all saying the same thing? That's bad news.
- 2143 3y ago
  Go stay at those big name hotels, such as Sheraton, Mariott, Hilton, Le Meridian, Obero, Ritz-Carlton, Taj, Leela etc. Most of these are present in major cities across India. They're a little on the expensive side though. (I'm NOT affiliated in any way with any of the hotels mentioned in this post).
- _nalply 3y ago
  Twenty years ago I booked room with sea view at an Indian travel agency. We were dropped at a house fifteen minutes walking from beach. The next day I rented a motorbike and we relocated. We never saw a refund.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gnicholas 3y ago
I've heard from establishments after leaving reviews on several occasions. Typically they will either offer a free meal or a refund of the unsuccessful meal. I will update a review to let people know that I was taken care of, but I haven't ever taken down a review. I would consider doing so if my experience had been one-off, and I understood that it would not happen again (e.g., if an employee acted terribly and was no longer working there). One frustrating incident I had was when I stayed in an airbnb and found cockroaches, lack of hot water, and general filthiness. I wasn't able to leave a review because airbnb moved me to another unit (after many hours spent on the phone), and my account showed I had never stayed in the problematic unit. I can see why hosts would like a policy like this, but it's terrible for guests.
- smashed 3y ago
  That is also why Airbnb as a company is doing Ok, but not great. In other words, a terrible investment.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    They were doing much better before their cost advantaged disappeared when they had to pay local taxes, and before current interest rates whacked hosts.
- bambax 3y ago
  Airbnb lets hosts remove bad reviews. It happened to me once, and it killed the whole Airbnb experience for me (I never used it again since).
- g-b-r 3y ago
  Try Airbnb a few more times and you'll find out many more reasons to avoid it (the large majority of places are listed on other sites in any case)
iammer 3y ago
Amazon seems to encourage this. I ordered a pair of cheap wireless headphones that were highly rated. I get them and they are crap. But, included in the package is a flyer offering an Amazon gift card for more than I paid for the headphones if I gave a 5-star review. My integrity is worth way more to me that that. So I leave a one-star review with a picture of the flyer, hopefully someone else will see that and realize the reviews are fake. Amazon rejected my review because it didn't meet their guidelines since it mentioned "Reviews given in exchange for cash, discounts."
- kstrauser 3y ago
  Same with me. Amazon rejected my review that was similar to yours, so I blogged about it instead: https://honeypot.net/post/amazon-seller-tried-to-bribe-me/ https://honeypot.net/post/amazon-seller-tried-to-bribe-me/ If it happens again, I'll go straight to blogging without bothering to report it to Amazon. I may not have that many readers, but it's more than the zero that I'd have through a rejected Amazon review.
  - CSMastermind 3y ago
    I know I'm not adding anything new but I just wanted to chime in and say I've had the exact same experience as another data point for how widespread it seems to be.
    - appplication 3y ago
      I’ve had this experience probably 20+ times over the last few years with Amazon. Stars on Amazon cannot be trusted. Even products on Amazon from verified sellers can’t be trusted to not be fake. My general policy is don’t buy anything from Amazon for which I have any quality expectations.
- 6DM 3y ago
  Your comment made me go lookup my old reviews. It's crazy, most of them were deleted. I would have expected to receive some kind of notification. I thought I could sift through the rubble to discern fake from real but now I know Amazon reviews are absolutely worthless.
fsckboy 3y ago
Ratings should always be on a curve for the rater, and on a 10 point scale, with no official meaning attached to the number of stars. If you rate everything 10 stars, you just gave everything 5 stars. If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. (you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." No, it wouldn't, that's exactly the type of situation that Gaussians know how to handle. Whatever is the average rating and whatever is the excellent rating will emerge from the collective.) if you wish to attack my plan, I'll only listen if you offer a defense of the status quo, or offer a better improvement plan.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > if you wish to attack my plan, I'll only listen if you offer a defense of the status quo, or offer a better improvement plan. Sorry but you don't get to set the terms of your own critique. If you refuse to listen then that impugns your character, but it doesn't make the critique invalid. You method is flawed because some people only leave reviews when they good service or only when they get bad service. Everyone has a different reason why they do things, and what motivates them to do things. This will only work if you force people to leave reviews, and in that case your chances of getting a legitimate rating is much smaller. You system would be better suited to de-rate the importance of people who leave a lot of reviews that are consistently skewed towards one end, but apply such a system to everyone is not going to make the results more fair.
- neilv 3y ago
  > If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. If you want your positive rating of something to have the most impact (for whatever reason), then you need to give negative ratings to other things (even if they deserve better)?
- jmye 3y ago
  My issue is that we’ve been trained to see things on a broken scale - 10 is good, 9 is good, 8 is probably ok, 7 is questionable and everything else is really bad. I get it’s chicken/egg, but I feel like you can’t adjust ratings without retraining people on what ratings mean. I guess that means I think we should probably do away with the numbers and think about a more qualitative approach? Not a strong belief.
irishloop 3y ago
I once gave an Airbnb 4 stars because I was annoyed they had no way to make coffee, even though it was basically a hotel being run as an Airbnb. Like, not even a cheap Keurig in the lobby They DMed me and told me that was bullshit and if I wanted coffee, I should've filtered by that amenity Which is amazing because coffee is so expected you can't even search by it
- lakpan 3y ago
  I mean… they’re not 100% wrong.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    Nah, they're 100% wrong. Maybe a coffee maker isn't as fundamental as, say, a stove or refrigerator, but I'd be unhappily surprised if the place I booked didn't have one. To my recollection, I've never been somewhere without coffee. It wouldn't occur to me to filter for such a thing. Should I also be looking for places that have pillows? I do see what you're saying, but that's an expected basic amenity.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      I feel like it depends somewhat on where the unit is located. If it's in a downtown area with half a dozen coffee shops within a few blocks, maybe it's not necessary. But if it's in the suburbs, then yeah coffee is pretty much required. I wonder what percent of people make use of provided coffee. Some people are pretty strict about what kind of coffee they like, and wouldn't want to use whatever is provided. And some people don't drink coffee, of course.
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        “Lovely room, but I have to get up and dressed before I can get caffeine, which makes me subconsciously associate it with a headache and stuffy sinuses.” A study I just looked up said 74% of American adults drink coffee every day. Of those, approximately 9 of 10 would prefer not to have to leave the house for their morning eye-opener, and 1 in 10 prefer papercuts then lime juice in their eye. Seriously, no innkeeper who isn’t personally opposed to coffee for some reason would risk pissing off 75% of their customers, especially when it’s so cheap and easy to supply. I would genuinely rather a place lack pillows than on-site coffee.
SoftTalker 3y ago
I don't review anything. It's not worth even 10 seconds of my time. It's all fake anyway.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  I disagree. The best way to counter a wall of fake reviews is one thorough, real review. Add a few photos, if you can. I review every hotel I stay at. From time to time, I switch on a VPN, go into private browsing, and get a bit of joy when I see that my 500+ word Google reviews are the first thing people see.
- lakpan 3y ago
  That’s just wrong. Plenty of useful information in reviews, even when most of them are gamed. Bad reviews are always useful so you should leave them, especially if they exist to counter the good fake ones.
ryandrake 3y ago
Honestly, I can't believe it is 2024 and people still believe/trust user-generated reviews of any sort. Isn't it widely known that these are always gamed, manipulated, algorithmically distorted and just totally unsuitable for making any kind of judgment about a product? I'm shocked that people and companies still pay attention to these streams of garbage.
- lakpan 3y ago
  I don’t trust the positive ones but their content is useful. Sometimes I want to know the entrance price or if anyone complained about something. Most people don’t know reviews are largely gamed, so that’s why people believe them.
- eitland 3y ago
  I solve it for now by looking for 4 star reviews and reading them :-) I think this often gives at least an indication of what to expect.
- exhilaration 3y ago
  I partially disagree. Just as an example, the 1-4 star reviews on Amazon are usually spot-on. It's always worth spending a minute or two to skim through those, starting with the lowest ratings first, while ignoring the 5 star reviews.
lsy 3y ago
Ultimately a professional reviewer wouldn't be so easily swayed by this kind of sleazy behavior, but this is the price for having a stack of "reviews" for every gin joint in every town in the world, all written by Joe Public. Ultimately I think the old system was better: for most restaurants or trips, the "cost" of finding out whether you personally like a place is relatively small, and for bigger outlays we had the Michelin guide, Zagat, or what have you.
semireg 3y ago
I stayed in a hotel recently via Hotwire. After my stay I received an email asking for my review using two separate icons, presumably two different links: one thumbs up and one thumbs down. I clicked on the thumbs down and received a 404. I gave up.
- Whoppertime 3y ago
  That's one way to keep positive review scores
nroets 3y ago
Airbnb also puts pressure on guests not to leave bad reviews: If you try to leave a 3 star review they ask you to explain using their criteria. And noise and lack of space aren't on that list. And they say they'll tell the host what to work on, as if paying full price for discomfort is acceptable. Most of the time, I just leave 4 star reviews for places I didn't like and then mention all my hassles in my public comment. Booking is much better: They ask you what you didn't like. (I've used both Airbnb and Booking over 50 times over the last 6 years)
- nomilk 3y ago
  Airbnb also occasionally removes bad reviews at the host's request. Same thing probably happens on other platforms. Example: Sometimes restaurant ratings on Uber Eats are a full 1 star above what they are on google.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Related from yesterday: Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber for Negative Review https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38677344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38677344
Christylucas 3y ago
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gudbrandemilie 3y ago
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LinaJ5 3y ago
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CelesteDvorak 3y ago
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Mistycurry7 3y ago
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64 points by lxm 3y ago

https://archive.is/a2spO https://archive.is/a2spO

I'm currently planning a trip to India. I've been to several countries around the world and never worried about reviews too much, but India really seems to align with this story. I'll see hotels with countless 5 star reviews (hundreds or even thousands!) that are overwhelmingly positive and get ready to book. But with one hotel my BS meter got triggered, since it was in a rather dingy seeming part of town but still had thousands of great reviews, the pictures were gorgeous, and it was fairly cheap. Also, the reviews were all written in the same voice. "The owner is a very good sir top number one" style. The low reviews had pictures of holes in the walls, bugs, exposed wires, and dozens of comments of people saying "I don't remember posting it, but this hotel posted a 10/10 review under my name. I think they hacked my account" or "the owner forced me to write a positive review before checking in" kind of stuff. Since then, I've gone back and given a second look at all the hotels I've reserved so far and order reviews by negative first. So many are just fake or coerced reviews. I compared against places I've stayed in the past and I've seen no such thing. Delhi, in particular, seems overwhelmingly fraudulent and with owners openly getting pissed if you don't leave positive reviews. Small towns in India seem like they're probably okay (guests posting smiling selfies around the hotel and nothing overtly suspicious or anything), but I'm definitely feeling anxious about my upcoming trip. Then there's the famous case where Thailand tried to arrest a man for a not positive review: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/29/american-wesley-barnes-faces-prison-thailand-bad-hotel-review https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/29/american-wesle...

gnicholas 3y ago
> Since then, I've gone back and given a second look at all the hotels I've reserved so far and order reviews by negative first. So many are just fake or coerced reviews. Of course, there's also a risk of fake negative reviews, from competitors.
- justworkout 3y ago
  That's something I've definitely worried about and seen some people mention in reviews around India. I mostly try to identify the voice of the comment writer. If they're from America but talking in odd English with a 10/10 review, I doubt it's real. Same if it's 1/10 from America and written with strange grammar.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    Sadly, generative AI will probably render this clever heuristic ineffective (at least at savvier establishments).
    - paradox460 3y ago
      Just look for the review to summarize what it said at the end
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Society is very good at adapting to such things. It will be an arms race for sure, but I don't think there is going to be a crisis of people being suckered by AI generated reviews. If it gets bad enough people will just stop giving them any weight at all, or even treat a lot of good reviews that are well written as suspicious. Then we will find some other way to find out quality of goods and services which will then be gamed at a greater and greater level until that too becomes unusable.
alejo 3y ago
One strategy I use is to focus on negative reviews. Read as many and see what things they are complaining about. Something you can see patterns of petty complains, and other times you can detect bigger issues that may make you look elsewhere instead
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  FWIW this works with American hotels, too. Some bad reviews are normal. Lots of bad reviews all saying the same thing? That's bad news.
2143 3y ago
Go stay at those big name hotels, such as Sheraton, Mariott, Hilton, Le Meridian, Obero, Ritz-Carlton, Taj, Leela etc. Most of these are present in major cities across India. They're a little on the expensive side though. (I'm NOT affiliated in any way with any of the hotels mentioned in this post).
_nalply 3y ago
Twenty years ago I booked room with sea view at an Indian travel agency. We were dropped at a house fifteen minutes walking from beach. The next day I rented a motorbike and we relocated. We never saw a refund.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

gnicholas 3y ago

I've heard from establishments after leaving reviews on several occasions. Typically they will either offer a free meal or a refund of the unsuccessful meal. I will update a review to let people know that I was taken care of, but I haven't ever taken down a review. I would consider doing so if my experience had been one-off, and I understood that it would not happen again (e.g., if an employee acted terribly and was no longer working there). One frustrating incident I had was when I stayed in an airbnb and found cockroaches, lack of hot water, and general filthiness. I wasn't able to leave a review because airbnb moved me to another unit (after many hours spent on the phone), and my account showed I had never stayed in the problematic unit. I can see why hosts would like a policy like this, but it's terrible for guests.

smashed 3y ago
That is also why Airbnb as a company is doing Ok, but not great. In other words, a terrible investment.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  They were doing much better before their cost advantaged disappeared when they had to pay local taxes, and before current interest rates whacked hosts.
bambax 3y ago
Airbnb lets hosts remove bad reviews. It happened to me once, and it killed the whole Airbnb experience for me (I never used it again since).
g-b-r 3y ago
Try Airbnb a few more times and you'll find out many more reasons to avoid it (the large majority of places are listed on other sites in any case)

iammer 3y ago

Amazon seems to encourage this. I ordered a pair of cheap wireless headphones that were highly rated. I get them and they are crap. But, included in the package is a flyer offering an Amazon gift card for more than I paid for the headphones if I gave a 5-star review. My integrity is worth way more to me that that. So I leave a one-star review with a picture of the flyer, hopefully someone else will see that and realize the reviews are fake. Amazon rejected my review because it didn't meet their guidelines since it mentioned "Reviews given in exchange for cash, discounts."

kstrauser 3y ago
Same with me. Amazon rejected my review that was similar to yours, so I blogged about it instead: https://honeypot.net/post/amazon-seller-tried-to-bribe-me/ https://honeypot.net/post/amazon-seller-tried-to-bribe-me/ If it happens again, I'll go straight to blogging without bothering to report it to Amazon. I may not have that many readers, but it's more than the zero that I'd have through a rejected Amazon review.
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  I know I'm not adding anything new but I just wanted to chime in and say I've had the exact same experience as another data point for how widespread it seems to be.
  - appplication 3y ago
    I’ve had this experience probably 20+ times over the last few years with Amazon. Stars on Amazon cannot be trusted. Even products on Amazon from verified sellers can’t be trusted to not be fake. My general policy is don’t buy anything from Amazon for which I have any quality expectations.
6DM 3y ago
Your comment made me go lookup my old reviews. It's crazy, most of them were deleted. I would have expected to receive some kind of notification. I thought I could sift through the rubble to discern fake from real but now I know Amazon reviews are absolutely worthless.

fsckboy 3y ago

Ratings should always be on a curve for the rater, and on a 10 point scale, with no official meaning attached to the number of stars. If you rate everything 10 stars, you just gave everything 5 stars. If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. (you might say "but if I only select the best places, and the ratings are always confirmed, that would be downvoting them." No, it wouldn't, that's exactly the type of situation that Gaussians know how to handle. Whatever is the average rating and whatever is the excellent rating will emerge from the collective.) if you wish to attack my plan, I'll only listen if you offer a defense of the status quo, or offer a better improvement plan.

Eisenstein 3y ago
> if you wish to attack my plan, I'll only listen if you offer a defense of the status quo, or offer a better improvement plan. Sorry but you don't get to set the terms of your own critique. If you refuse to listen then that impugns your character, but it doesn't make the critique invalid. You method is flawed because some people only leave reviews when they good service or only when they get bad service. Everyone has a different reason why they do things, and what motivates them to do things. This will only work if you force people to leave reviews, and in that case your chances of getting a legitimate rating is much smaller. You system would be better suited to de-rate the importance of people who leave a lot of reviews that are consistently skewed towards one end, but apply such a system to everyone is not going to make the results more fair.
neilv 3y ago
> If you want your 10 stars to mean 10 stars, you need to rate a bell curve of other stuff too. If you want your positive rating of something to have the most impact (for whatever reason), then you need to give negative ratings to other things (even if they deserve better)?
jmye 3y ago
My issue is that we’ve been trained to see things on a broken scale - 10 is good, 9 is good, 8 is probably ok, 7 is questionable and everything else is really bad. I get it’s chicken/egg, but I feel like you can’t adjust ratings without retraining people on what ratings mean. I guess that means I think we should probably do away with the numbers and think about a more qualitative approach? Not a strong belief.

irishloop 3y ago

I once gave an Airbnb 4 stars because I was annoyed they had no way to make coffee, even though it was basically a hotel being run as an Airbnb. Like, not even a cheap Keurig in the lobby They DMed me and told me that was bullshit and if I wanted coffee, I should've filtered by that amenity Which is amazing because coffee is so expected you can't even search by it

lakpan 3y ago
I mean… they’re not 100% wrong.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  Nah, they're 100% wrong. Maybe a coffee maker isn't as fundamental as, say, a stove or refrigerator, but I'd be unhappily surprised if the place I booked didn't have one. To my recollection, I've never been somewhere without coffee. It wouldn't occur to me to filter for such a thing. Should I also be looking for places that have pillows? I do see what you're saying, but that's an expected basic amenity.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    I feel like it depends somewhat on where the unit is located. If it's in a downtown area with half a dozen coffee shops within a few blocks, maybe it's not necessary. But if it's in the suburbs, then yeah coffee is pretty much required. I wonder what percent of people make use of provided coffee. Some people are pretty strict about what kind of coffee they like, and wouldn't want to use whatever is provided. And some people don't drink coffee, of course.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      “Lovely room, but I have to get up and dressed before I can get caffeine, which makes me subconsciously associate it with a headache and stuffy sinuses.” A study I just looked up said 74% of American adults drink coffee every day. Of those, approximately 9 of 10 would prefer not to have to leave the house for their morning eye-opener, and 1 in 10 prefer papercuts then lime juice in their eye. Seriously, no innkeeper who isn’t personally opposed to coffee for some reason would risk pissing off 75% of their customers, especially when it’s so cheap and easy to supply. I would genuinely rather a place lack pillows than on-site coffee.

SoftTalker 3y ago

I don't review anything. It's not worth even 10 seconds of my time. It's all fake anyway.

ryukoposting 3y ago
I disagree. The best way to counter a wall of fake reviews is one thorough, real review. Add a few photos, if you can. I review every hotel I stay at. From time to time, I switch on a VPN, go into private browsing, and get a bit of joy when I see that my 500+ word Google reviews are the first thing people see.
lakpan 3y ago
That’s just wrong. Plenty of useful information in reviews, even when most of them are gamed. Bad reviews are always useful so you should leave them, especially if they exist to counter the good fake ones.

ryandrake 3y ago

Honestly, I can't believe it is 2024 and people still believe/trust user-generated reviews of any sort. Isn't it widely known that these are always gamed, manipulated, algorithmically distorted and just totally unsuitable for making any kind of judgment about a product? I'm shocked that people and companies still pay attention to these streams of garbage.

lakpan 3y ago
I don’t trust the positive ones but their content is useful. Sometimes I want to know the entrance price or if anyone complained about something. Most people don’t know reviews are largely gamed, so that’s why people believe them.
eitland 3y ago
I solve it for now by looking for 4 star reviews and reading them :-) I think this often gives at least an indication of what to expect.
exhilaration 3y ago
I partially disagree. Just as an example, the 1-4 star reviews on Amazon are usually spot-on. It's always worth spending a minute or two to skim through those, starting with the lowest ratings first, while ignoring the 5 star reviews.

lsy 3y ago

Ultimately a professional reviewer wouldn't be so easily swayed by this kind of sleazy behavior, but this is the price for having a stack of "reviews" for every gin joint in every town in the world, all written by Joe Public. Ultimately I think the old system was better: for most restaurants or trips, the "cost" of finding out whether you personally like a place is relatively small, and for bigger outlays we had the Michelin guide, Zagat, or what have you.

semireg 3y ago

I stayed in a hotel recently via Hotwire. After my stay I received an email asking for my review using two separate icons, presumably two different links: one thumbs up and one thumbs down. I clicked on the thumbs down and received a 404. I gave up.

Whoppertime 3y ago
That's one way to keep positive review scores

nroets 3y ago

Airbnb also puts pressure on guests not to leave bad reviews: If you try to leave a 3 star review they ask you to explain using their criteria. And noise and lack of space aren't on that list. And they say they'll tell the host what to work on, as if paying full price for discomfort is acceptable. Most of the time, I just leave 4 star reviews for places I didn't like and then mention all my hassles in my public comment. Booking is much better: They ask you what you didn't like. (I've used both Airbnb and Booking over 50 times over the last 6 years)

nomilk 3y ago
Airbnb also occasionally removes bad reviews at the host's request. Same thing probably happens on other platforms. Example: Sometimes restaurant ratings on Uber Eats are a full 1 star above what they are on google.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Related from yesterday: Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber for Negative Review https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38677344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38677344

Christylucas 3y ago

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