That's not a realistic solution.
If all the reviews were fake 5 stars but it's just the property's friends always leaving reviews then when you got there, you feel there's no way it's 5 stars. But less obvious is property manager says, hey i'll give you a 5% discount for 5 stars, when really the place was a 3-star at best.
Those shifts in star ratings are material in your personal decision making process.
Airbnb is incentivized to have higher scores because lower ratings might not push people to other properties - it might discourage them from booking all together. They need them to not be totally worthless, but score inflation is definitively in their best interest.
I don’t trust sites like Airbnb and I understand how sites have problems with review fraud.
If I posted with a unique signature then over time people could learn that mine aren’t fake.
Also would be nice to know that the Airbnb reviewer also rated a restaurant and some headphones, etc.
So you can basically collect people who review in ways that are useful to you and layer that over the web to rank search results, apartments, blenders, etc etc.
Compare reviews on Steam to reviews on Airbnb. You'll quickly notice something, Steam shows you far more information at a glance. You get to know whether someone bought the game themselves or if it was given free to them, how many hours they played before the review, how many hours they played in total, their rating, how other people feel about that review, how many other products the user has, if the review was edited, and of course review text.
Airbnb's reviews has a scoring system that was generalized, and review text, maybe a translation badge if the review was translated.
Reviews work best when you are given as much information as possible. Without it, you might as well be relying on an anonymous 5 star system.
True but also one they’ve created for profit. They choose to ignore complaints about hosts to avoid losing their fees, they choose not to audit reviews, etc. There’s an entire industry of people who get paid to do mystery shopping to review customer experiences, which is quite effective but not free since you can’t automate it at scale.
This seems like it’s basically a VC playbook now: focus on growth numbers and assume you’ll be able to convey the shiny tech imagine until you reach market dominance, and avoid spending money visibly on “menial” jobs to support the image that you are about to be unbelievably profitable.
I wonder if "tipping" could improve things.
A new platform like airbnb could have an expected tip built in to the platform. Hosts are expected to provide good service and get a tip.
Customers are encouraged to tip at the end of their stay (with a lower base price than airbnb to account for that).
Hosts can see the average, median, max, and min tips of potential customers (along with distribution, and percentage calculations) and use that to determine whether to accept them as a guest.
Customers can see the average tip a listing received, and use that to determine if they'd want to stay there. Of course, they would sometimes leave $0 or a low number as a tip, but they'd be incentivized to also provide good tips for good service, because a low tip average would reflect poorly on them and make them less likely to be hosted.
I suspect tying things to real value for the customer and host would lead to better service and a more honest indication of host/customer quality.
But perhaps it would just lead to hosts literally bribing customers for good tips.
Now I'm forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list...
If the industry moves to service included, then the prices will still be 15-20% higher, or more, than they are today. You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however.
Multiples of 5% calculations is pretty simple and keeps the brain sharp. It’d also be easy to show the price with tips, but dark patterns.
The incentive to provide better service for individual employees should be provided by their employer.
The incentive for the employer to provide better service to customers is competition with other service providers the client might choose.
Which is how it works in all the jobs that aren’t within the weird and arbitrary bounds of tipping culture.
Also this has been tried before, and was widely considered a failure. People don’t like surprise fees, inflated prices, etc. They don’t mind tipping as it gives them some control back.
My job also “tips” me. Every year if my manager likes my work from the previous year then I get more RSUs. If they don’t like my work, then I don’t get RSUs (and maybe fired). Tipping is everywhere.
Increased prices are what it should be, just as it is in every business outside of tipping culture. Tipping culture is not the same thing as increased prices.
> Also this has been tried before, and was widely considered a failure.
It works just fine in much of the world. It even works fine in the US where foe some things normally covered by tipping culture, a flat fee in lieu of gratuity is applied in certain circunstances (e.g., restaurants do this with largw parties quite often.) It works just fine in places with tipping culture in all the customer service jobs that are arbitrarily outside of its coverage.
> My job also “tips” me. Every year if my manager likes my work from the previous year then I get more RSUs. If they don’t like my work, then I don’t get RSUs (and maybe fired). Tipping is everywhere.
Incentive pay from your empkoyer is not a culture of tips from your employer’s customers.
The market said no.
> It works just fine in much of the world. It even works fine in the US where foe some things normally covered by tipping culture, a flat fee in lieu of gratuity is applied in certain circunstances (e.g., restaurants do this with largw parties quite often.) It works just fine in places with tipping culture in all the customer service jobs that are arbitrarily outside of its coverage.
That’s great, but it didn’t work in the US. Some of the larger corps ran the experiment for 4 years and when the waiters lost income they complained. You see, here tipping culture means they make more money.
> Incentive pay from your empkoyer is not a culture of tips from your employer’s customers.
It’s exactly the same. It’s lay I would not have received otherwise.
> hasn’t been implemented
I’m not going to evangelize what a correct stance on this is, but IMHO tipping is a big, not a feature.
There's no good answer to this. Anyone that allows/relies on direct consumer feedback is at risk for one of the hardest problems that exist.
Personally, I want to know people's great and real experiences, or terrible ones, who wouldn't!? But, once you tie it to money, it's over.