After my stay, I reported it to Airbnb. I didn't want to leave a review because I didn't want to deal with the fallout if Airbnb banned the host and they knew I was responsible. Airbnb ignored the report, the listing is still active, and none of the reviews mention the problem. I wonder how many other guests reported the problem to Airbnb without leaving a review as well.
Until airbnb starts cleaning up their mess I think people will eventually realize that this is just another scam in the long run.
At the same time, the apartment front desk staff and doorman were completely aware of my staying there temporarily. I showed up, asked for the keys, the front desk had an envelope, and there were no questions. They must have someone doing that every few weeks, and the signs are someone else's business.
Most of the inhabitants are people with 9-5 jobs who wish to enjoy a quiet evening after a long day at work. Having tourists next door doesn't help.
People coming home drunk late at night, kids playing soccer in the hallway, Scandinavian women walking around topless and in thong at the pool* - Airbnb guests treat the condo building like a resort, which it isn't.
The walls and doors are thinner, there's no carpet in the hallway and there are less elevators than in a hotel.
Here's a message to everyone considering renting an apartment on Airbnb: GET A GODDAMN HOTEL ROOM!
Thank you SV for "disrupting" my quiet evening [/endrant]
* I know some might actually enjoy this, but Thailand is a conservative Buddhist country. Respect that please.
So you get a window of a few weeks in which you can write a review. If you leave a review, then you get to see the review about yourself straight away. But if you don't review, then you have to wait until your own window has closed. After that, you're able to see the review about yourself regardless of whether you left a review yourself – because you are no longer able to leave a retaliatory review.
Airbnb aren't very clear about this at all, and that certainly pushes people to leave reviews, but it's a side effect that Airbnb play up, not the actual designed purpose of the review system.
It's amazing to go read a novel rated 3 stars (because it operates outside this loop) and find it transcendently good.
The problem with star based rating systems is that they're INCREDIBLY subjective. I oftentimes read yelp reviews that are 3 star reviews where the person raves about the restaurant and then complains about a minor issue. I have a similar issue with app store ratings where I've had a rash of people rate one of my apps 1 star with the review text reading "I just downloaded this, I'll raise my review to 5 stars if love this app".
It's how the "official" reviews from Marriott/Hilton/etc all work
2. Ask each person a different objective question, intentionally filling in the gaps.
3. After a few people, you have an objective, relatively thorough view of the house, but you've not burdened any of your users with more than one question per stay.
It isn't just online, and it isn't just a technology problem. I recently bought a car and the manufacturer sent me a survey about the process. The salesman made sure, numerous times, to let me know that I'd be getting said survey and that anything less than a 10 meant he failed and that there would be negative consequences for him. Since I was mostly happy with the process, I gave him all 10s, even though one or two areas I would have rated a little lower. He got his good review and it didn't really bother me, but the car company lost out on some potentially useful feedback.
Some of the problems - like different people having a tendency to rate on different scales, ratings coming from different factors, etc - seem pretty amenable to a ML approach to make reviews a lot more useful, though. I wonder if anyone outside of a handful of companies (Amazon, Yelp, AirBnB, Google, etc) has enough data to make it useful, though?
I know I personally gave plenty of three star reviews on Lyft before I learned better, meaning them as "no complaints". Who knows what happened to those drivers as a result. Why even invite the misunderstanding?
In France for instance, it's very rare for a student to go above 15/20 or so at the college level (I graduated in the top 10% of my class with a 12/20 average; the top ranked student, whom I was friends with, had a 14/20 average).
But when I graded homework as a graduate student for an american university, the professor told me I was too harsh, and after adjusting my criteria to match what she wanted, I found myself giving many 100/100.
When it comes to ratings used by others to evaluate, no system is more customer and vendor-hostile than one where everything that meets a minimum threshold for adequacy should be rated as perfect.
I guess, at least a small step would be to make it so values less than the highest rating don't count against you so negatively - it should be ok to be a 3/5 or 7/10.
1. normalize reviews to make a 4 star from someone who always gives 5 stars worth less than a 3 star from someone who always gives 2 stars; and
2. make reviews secret?
Perception of books and concepts covered within are entirely subjective.
However, when it comes to service or product quality, you can be almost entirely objective in its value judgment.
Hmm. I'm willing to accept that the average reader is a more sophisticated and thoughtful consumer than for some other product categories. And there may be less overt tribalism and fanboyism in book reviews.
But, in my experience, there's still a lot of people who will almost unthinkingly give 5 stars to a favorite author or genre. (And I know some of those people who are pretty uncritical about SF books or whatever.)
Again, novels and products are entirely different in that you're hopefully shopping for a product by its specs. You can't 'research' novels beforehand (unless you count as reading other novels by the same author as research) and they don't have any specs to go by.
No, all assessments of value are subjective (and for most services involve subjective weighting of multiple different subjective quality factors.) And the mapping from an internal value judgement to a star rating is something which is a separate subjective evaluation, and one on which research has shown substantial cultural variation along ethnic and other lines.
The rating may be inaccurate because you can only measure in full stars, but it'll still be objective and the inaccuracy is the fault of the rating system, not me.
Objective (adjective):
> (of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.
On the popular restaurant review site Tabelog, a 3.6 (out of 5) is a very good ranking; there's more 3-star Michelin restaurants in Tokyo than restaurants above 4.5.
If you do it secretly like shadowbanning and introduce it softly by slowly blending between conventional score and normalized, it would drive a whole generation of SEO/social/share-economy experts delightfully mad. Think of all the free publicity!
Jokes aside, it might help to regard low ratings as what they are: a way to flag bad behavior, dead serious stuff. We should stop pretending that it is a game, then maybe solutions will be more likely to appear.
There are particular instances (like in this case) where there are a lot of incentives for just about everyone to give 5 stars, 10 stars, or a positive and call it a day.
But, in general, there are issues with self-selection, bias toward the high end of the scale, ratings meaning different things for different types and classes of product, etc.
Airbnb pushes hosts really, really hard to achieve >80% 5-star reviews. If <80% then the listing gets pushed down the rankings and you lose SuperHost status.
Some guests never give 5-star reviews for whatever reason. They really, seriously hurt the host. If your average is >4.0 (and it should be over 4.5) then any review less than 5 stars will lower your rating.
I worked in a restaurant and was trying hard to get our TripAdvisor ranking higher. One quiet night a guy comes in so we chat and give him some great service, special dishes etc. At the end of the meal he said it was excellent and had left us a 4 star review. I said "Dude, our average is 4.8 stars, you just made us look worse."
In the end we got to #2 in our city. The #1 was a cafe that was only open 7 am to 4 pm. All you need for 5 star review in a cafe is a hot coffee, so we settled for #2.
https://qz.com/410264/you-should-never-trust-an-airbnb-revie...
This is an interesting problem, and yes, needs to be accommodated some how. I used to manage a SW product and service offering that had customers around the planet. We sent out quarterly report cards in order to ensure we were meeting customers needs. It was As and Bs exclusively except for one country that was Ds and Fs for the same level of quality and service.
Some type of calibration or break down is needed.
I don't airBnB, but a friend who does was recently berated by a host after leaving a 4-star review; that host claimed (don't know how true this is) that many hosts will refuse to rent to you again if you leave anything but a 5-star review.
That and other things I've seen and heard about airBnB reviews suggest to me that there a structural problems that are likely to make it problematic for them to become honest and useful in general, even on top of the usual problems in numeric/star rated reviews that come from cultural differences in how people rate when given such a scale even when the actual substantive opinion is the same.