Airbnb guests accuse it of deleting negative reviews and boosting bad hosts
Airbnb guests accuse it of deleting negative reviews and
boosting bad hosts
By Alison Griswold August 5, 2018
The two-bedroom condo that Donna Oakley arrived to in
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in late June didn’t look much like the five-star
property she’d booked on Airbnb.
The windows in the living room were streaked and milky,
hardly the clean, sunny room that was advertised. One window had a large cobweb
in the corner and dead bugs inside the sill. There was mold in the kitchen
cabinets and around the floorboards, the oven door was coated in grease, and
the vents were caked with dirt. In the bathroom, the toilet bowl had dark
orange stains and the sink faucet handle was broken.
“That place was nasty,” Oakley, 59, said.
Oakley, who is retired and lives in Fort Myers, Florida,
had booked the condo a few months earlier for a four-week visit to family in
Winston-Salem. She had stayed in Airbnbs many times—using the home-rental
company to travel to London, Rome, Paris, Naples, Venice, and Puerto Rico,
among other destinations—and always had good experiences. (Oakley is the mother
of a former Quartz employee.)
After three nights in the Winston-Salem condo, Oakley and
her husband found a new place to stay. They had also had issues with the
neighbors, who parked their car in the Airbnb’s designated spot, and who Oakley
said threatened her after she asked them to move their vehicle. Oakley
contacted Airbnb, which refunded her the remaining four days in the first week,
the only portion of the 28-day booking she had paid for at that point. Then she
wrote a review.
“We felt it was necessary to move our car somewhere else…
and this was not a safe environment due to the threat of violence,” she wrote
in a review that detailed the confrontation with the condo’s neighbors. “The
condo is in need of a significant cleaning. It appears to have been neglected.”
Airbnb hosts and guests have 14 days after checkout to
write a review, and the company doesn’t post them online until both parties
have completed their evaluations, or the 14 days have expired. Oakley submitted
two paragraphs totaling 311 words. The review that eventually appeared under
her name was just one sentence: “Please be aware that this property is unclean
and the neighbors are rude and threatened violence in reference to a parking
space (which is extremely limited).”
Airbnb’s ratings system is only as good as its reviews.
Airbnb built a $31 billion travel and lodging company by
convincing millions of travelers that staying in a stranger’s apartment was as
good or better than booking a room in a hotel. The company’s five-star review
system, which lets guests review hosts and properties and hosts review their
guests, is one of its most important tools in fostering the trust needed to
make a home-sharing community work.
“You have to remember that before Airbnb existed, this
was a really, really rare transaction in the economy—and now it’s become really
common,” said Andrey Fradkin, an assistant professor at Boston University
Questrom School of Business and former data scientist at Airbnb. “The
introduction of the reputation system is part of the key reasons for why this
marketplace has been able to succeed.”
Of course, the system is only as good as its reviews, and
Oakley and four other Airbnb users who spoke to Quartz allege that Airbnb
tampered with theirs. These Airbnb guests say the negative reviews they
submitted to the company after a bad experience were either edited or quietly
removed from the site without their knowledge or permission.
In an emailed statement, Airbnb spokesperson Nick Papas
said authentic reviews are “critical to building trust” between the company’s
hosts and guests. He pointed to Airbnb’s content policy, which outlines why a
review might be taken down, such as for illegal, profane, or discriminatory
material. “The goal of this policy is to ensure that any fraudulent or
misleading content is not allowed on the site,” he said. “Just as critical,
this policy also exists to protect the integrity of authentic feedback from our
community.”
Leslie McCree, 51, used Airbnb for the first time in
early June to vacation with her husband and daughter in Sunnyvale, California.
McCree, who works as a public health advisor in Atlanta, Georgia, was initially
concerned that the unit didn’t have any air conditioning, according to its
listing. But, she said, the condo had exclusively five-star reviews and the
host assured her in a direct message that it didn’t get that hot in the Bay
Area.
“It was very hot,” McCree said, “and there was one little
table-top fan.” She also discovered hair in the bathtub, dust and debris in the
pullout sofa, soiled linens, dirty skillets, and dead bugs in the cabinets. The
upstairs neighbors were loud. And because the unit was on the first floor, she
felt uncomfortable leaving the windows open at night.
In her review, a copy of which McCree messaged to the
Airbnb host and also shared with Quartz, she described the condo as “hot as
heck” and noted its dirtiness and the loud upstairs neighbors. When the review
didn’t appear after several days, she contacted Airbnb through its in-app
support, which explained the 14-day policy.
When McCree still couldn’t locate her review after 14
days, she contacted Airbnb again. “The review you posted has now been re
posted,” a support rep responded later that day. She checked that the review
had posted like Airbnb said, and it had. But when McCree searched for her
review again in July after being contacted by Quartz for this story, it was
gone. She wrote to support again on July 19, noting that she had “been
contacted by the media regarding this issue.” On July 21, another Airbnb
support rep, who identified himself as a supervisor, told McCree her review had
been re-posted.
McCree said she doesn’t plan to use Airbnb again. “I
think the reviews are all hyped up to entice the person to book the property
and in turn make money for Airbnb,” she said.
Airbnb wouldn’t be the first internet company to run into
trouble with online reviews. Travel website TripAdvisor in 2017 apologized
after it was caught repeatedly deleting a review of a Mexican resort by a woman
who said she was raped there by a security guard. Also in 2017, a writer for
Vice in the UK duped TripAdvisor into making his shed London’s top-rated
restaurant.
Ride-hailing company Uber, which asks riders to rate
their driver at the end of each trip, has struggled with ratings inflation.
Riders are generally reluctant to leave less than a perfect five-star rating,
which is widely understood to hurt the driver.
“The reputation system is a primary means… to prevent bad
actors from misrepresenting their listings.”
An April 2018 paper (pdf) by Fradkin and two others on
the effectiveness of Airbnb reviews noted that “negative experiences are
underreported.” Their paper used 2014 data, before Airbnb required hosts and
guests to submit reviews or wait 14 days before they post, and theorized that
guests were withholding negative feedback in part because they feared
retaliation. They found that when a “simultaneous reveal” was introduced, there
was a modest decline in five-star ratings of hosts and a similar uptick in
overall review rates.
“The reputation system is a primary means by which you’re
going to prevent bad actors from misrepresenting their listings and delivering
bad service,” Fradkin told Quartz.
Several of the Airbnb guests who spoke with Quartz said they
decided to leave negative reviews as a warning to future travelers. “I don’t
want other people to go through this experience,” said Mostafa El-Hoshy, 33. He
rented an Airbnb in Manhattan around Thanksgiving last year for himself and his
parents that turned out to have rusty faucets, dirty floorboards, and a
trash-filled dumpster blocking the entrance. The featured photo on the listing
was an aerial view of Union Square Park, though the caption noted it was “not a
view from the window.”
El-Hoshy wrote to Airbnb on his first night in the
apartment about what he felt was a deceptive listing, including photos of the
unit. The company told him it had given the host until noon the following day
to “get those issues resolved,” according to messages he shared with Quartz.
El-Hoshy asked Airbnb to cancel the reservation.
What was advertised at the Airbnb Mostafa El-Hoshy booked
vs. the unit’s actual entrance.
Airbnb later told El-Hoshy that the host “did meet the
deadline to get those items fixed” and that he didn’t qualify for a full refund
because “the host was working with us to accommodate the issues.” “I do see
where his listing can be misleading,” a support rep who identified herself as
“Beth” wrote, “but in the description visible, it states that the view of the
park isn’t from the window, but within walking distance away by being 1 block
away.”
El-Hoshy eventually contacted Chase, the credit-card
provider he’d used to book the Airbnb, which cancelled the transaction. He
wrote a negative review of the property and said it never posted. “You just
turned a huge Airbnb fan into a huge Airbnb detractor,” El-Hoshy wrote in one
of his last messages to Airbnb support.
Airbnb, after being contacted by Quartz, said both
McCree’s and El-Hoshy’s reviews “were removed in error,” but did not elaborate
on why. “We are working to ensure these review go back online, and reaching out
to these guests to apologize and fully refund them for the cost of their stay,”
Papas, Airbnb’s spokesman, said in an email. Both McCree and El-Hoshy confirmed
to Quartz that their reviews had been posted.
After Donna Oakley noticed that her two-paragraph Airbnb
review of the Winston-Salem condo had been rewritten as a single sentence, she
contacted support again to ask why it had been changed. “This was a nightmare
situation and I don’t want anyone else to ever be duped into renting,” Oakley
wrote to support, according to screenshots of messages she shared with Quartz.
“This property is a poor reflection of Airbnb and I’m sure if it had been my
first it would have been my last.”
When Airbnb replied, it didn’t explain why Oakley’s
review had been condensed and modified, but noted that its reviews are limited
to 500 words (Oakley submitted just over 300). “At this point we are unable to
help you complete the review as you desire,” the support rep said. “Thank you
for your understanding on this matter.” Oakley said all her messages with
Airbnb about the Winston-Salem condo have since disappeared from her Airbnb
account, as has any record of her booking the property.
Airbnb, after being told about the incident by Quartz,
initially suggested that “the guest might have left comments in a section that
isn’t public” and said it couldn’t “find any record of the review being
changed.” (Oakley said she’s sure she posted her comments in the correct
place.) The company said, as a general policy, it doesn’t edit reviews.
Oakley used to encourage all her friends to use Airbnb,
but after the Winston-Salem experience she doesn’t plan to proselytize it
anymore. “I have always been like, you’ve got to try it, let me show you what
to do,” she said. “And now I’m like, the reviews are not even true.”
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