If they detached this or made it separate from reviews it would perhaps reduce the fear of retributive reviews from bad hosts.

The big problem here is the vast difference between "We are going to verify..." and what they are actually planning. It's just dishonest.

AirBNB reviews are unpublished until both sides either finish their review or time out. It is simply not possible to read a bad review and then write a bad review in retaliation.

The retaliation is in response to contacting support, it works like this (I posted this elsewhere in the thread too):

guest => support: "the place was filthy, I want a refund"

support => host: "guest says it was filthy is that true"

host => support: "lol no"

host reviews guest: "terrible, all they did was complain, beware"

The Vice article also talked about retaliation, but I'm not clear how that worked: At least in the last few years, you can't see the owner's review until you've posted your own (or until a timeout happens and you lose your opportunity to make a review). And you can comment on reviews to tell your side of the story.

It would make sense for AirBNB to wait until the owner had left their initial review (or the review window timed out) before alerting them to the fact that they were going to get a bad one.

It's been a while since I used AirBNB so I'll take your word for it. The recent article in Vice suggested that the fear of retributive reviews was something a lot of people were concerned about, so I'm not sure where the disconnect is here.

From https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/43k7z3/nationwide-fake-ho...:

"After all, Airbnb uses a rating system in which both the host and tenant can publicly provide feedback to one another, which both parties then use to prove their credibility in the future.

Because of that, there is a built-in incentive to avoid confrontation, which helps explain why Airbnb hosts consistently receive higher ratings than hotels reviewed on TripAdvisor, according to research out of Boston University and the University of Southern California. If a customer has a negative experience on Airbnb, they might be better off just moving on instead of leaving a negative review."

Perhaps it's not retributive reviews so much as complaining during the stay. shrug

I believe it is possible for the next host to read your review of previous hosts. Why rent to anyone who ever left a bad review? In other words there is an incentive not to leave bad reviews.

As someone that owned a commercial holiday property, this is a real concern. I had instant booking, so I didn’t really care what prior reviews said, however there are some real jerks who are chronically unhappy. We got a 1 star review once because one of our holiday cottages didn’t have a salad spinner. Another complained because the outside air temperature was too hot — in August, in Provence. There are people that would complain about a beach having too much sand. Legitimate failures were taken seriously, but the vast majority of our “negative” reviews were just insanely silly. One person even complained that the free bottle of Rosé we gave them wasn’t chilled enough. One guest complained that the pool was too cold (in August,) while that same month, someone complained that the pool wasn’t cool enough.

I am delighted to be free of that business.

The theoretical or the actual ones? In theory, nothing. In practice, they’ve gotten a lot of bad press lately for ”sucks to be you”-oriented approach to reviews and complaints.

Remains to be seen if this improves things in practice