The author did not book the property through Airbnb. Had he done so, he would have learned what we do in these rare situations. His article missed a couple key points:
1) If a host cancels a reservation on a guest, a default review is generated stating that the host canceled X days before arrival. The guest can modify this auto-generated review if he wants to add color to it.
2) The host is penalized monetarily if he cancels on guests more than once per 90 days. The penalty is $100 if the cancellation is within one week of arrival, otherwise $50. Hosts that repeatedly cancel on guests may be removed from the site.
As a result of these policies, host cancellations are rare. Most occurrences are honest mistakes and not from repeat offenders.
I also work at Airbnb and would like to follow up on what Nate just said. Our review system is actually stronger than all the aforementioned sites because it is transaction based, i.e., only people who complete the transaction through Airbnb can leave a review.
Non-transaction based review sites like Yelp, VRBO, etc., are plagued with fake reviews by owners, guests, and competitors. On sites like that, how do you know that those glowing reviews you just read weren't written by the owners, their staff, or their friends? You don't.
By tying our double-sided review system to actual transactions you can have almost complete confidence that the reviews you are reading are the result of someone staying with, or hosting, another member of our community.
We have reached out to the author of the article to articulate this, but rest assured, had he booked through Airbnb he would have been able to write the review he wanted.
In addition to that, he wouldn't have sent money blindly to someone. We would be holding it until after he checks in and reminding the owner via email of the booking to prevent exactly this kind of situation from happening. And in the rare occasions when it does, our 24/7 customer team would have stepped in and helped to find him a new place or issue a complete and fast refund.
Sorry, but no. If I was an unscrupulous host and wanted to boost my listing, the first thing I'd do is have a bunch of friends (or fake accounts) book nights on my listing and leave glowing reviews. I'm out maybe $100 for Airbnb fees and now I have a slew of awesome reviews. What are the odds that this doesn't happen all the time?
When I was in Vietnam last year I booked a few cheap hotels in the 10-20 U$ a night range (nice ones by the way!) on Agoda.com.
Often the reviews went like "best breakfast in Asia" or "I will come back to Vietnam just to stay in this Hotel" but when I went there, they where nice but not THAT nice.
Once I went here http://www.agoda.com/asia/vietnam/hoi_an/sunflower_hotel.htm... as the reviews where incredibly good: but as I found out the internet was very slow, breakfast was a deception, the reception a bit rude and they even gave me a smaller room.
So I wrote a review adding to be careful about fake reviews.
Sure enough Agoda did not publish it and they did not even respond to my email asking why.
I did not expect a Facebook debit card but at least a "thank you" :)
After all I helped them spotting cheaters!
I was completely ignored.
The result is a side flooded by fake reviews costing a couple of bucks each to the Hotel manager.
That's cheaper than Adwords :)
Like? If I emailed a few friends around the country and asked them to help me out like that, how would Airbnb know?
I'm not saying they haven't considered it, I'm saying they can't stop it. Making the claim that a transaction based review system is inherently trustworthy seems either naive or disingenuous.
And if they have considered it, what are they doing about it? I'll bet you a thousand dollars if the suggested scenario happens, there is no mechanism in place to alert anyone, stop it, or deal with it, no matter how big the tracks left. Do you know how many of the NYC listings are pure scam?
I'll grant their review system is set up from the get-go to be the best of anyone out there.
Why did you change the title? The author didn't make any claim of Airbnb filtering potentially negative reviews. Airbnb didn't allow him to post a review in the first place since he didn't actually end up staying in the room (which I think is a reasonable policy that covers 99% of cases just fine). The point of the article, and what the original title of the article conveyed, was that there are some situations
where this is not optimal and where Yelp's review model has an advantage.
This is something I've been wondering about as I've noticed increasingly high stakes items being reviewed on sites like Yelp.
For example, I'm trying to figure out where I want to move next and it's commonplace for high rise apartment buildings to be on Yelp, but now that we're talking about a $25,000 lease rather than a $40 meal, the incentives to play around with the sentiment of the reviews are significant, as well as the potential financial reward for doing so. How can we trust the neutrality of the venue in these circumstances?
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."
When you understand that Hemingway quote, you will realize that all ratings services are inherently useless when it comes to the value of trust. In the case of Yelp, there really isn't any reason to trust them when their [financial] existence is maintained by the businesses that are reviewed on their site.
So when you're about to decide where to take your parents for Sunday dinner when they come to visit, don't reach for your iPhone. Go to a nice part of town and walk into a restaurant and be seated. And in the case that you don't like your parents, just take them to Denny's.
Yelp? Yelp is the home of people who post stuff like "they didn't serve chicken fingers!" for Sushi restaurants.
A fundamental feature/flaw in the apartment/house rental place is inconsistency. You're dealing with one rental owner by proxy via some listing joint. If you want consistency and reliable reviews, go to the Hilton and check TripAdvisor.
I too had a bad experience with a vacation rental and was unable to post my review to VRBO. That's why I founded Dwellable, a vacation rental site. Here's the full story on GeekWire from a few months ago:
This behavior on the part of HomeAway (VRBO) is really a natural consequence of their business model. When the property manager is your only customer, it doesn't make sense to post negative reviews.
We're doing things differently at Dwellable, of course.
I also feel there is inherent conflict of interest when users post negative reviews at sites like Seamless, Grubhub, AirBnB, VRBO etc. As these companies receive revenues from their partners they might be biased against negative reviews. It would be interesting to see some statistical analysis between reviews on Yelp and reviews on these sites on the same merchant (restaurant, property manager etc.).I would not be surprised if the analysis shows that some of these sites have an artificial upward bias in their reviews/ratings.
There are complaints out there about accepted VRBO reviews going away later. Yelp has even been accused of proactively offering this as an incentive to spend (perilously close to a protection racket). And of course there's nothing AirBnB wouldn't stoop to with Blecharczyk involved.
It seems to me we have a need for a fully independent system of reviews with some kind of social trust metric (maybe degrees of separation) and technical measures to prevent them from being silently unpublished by anyone (maybe signed authentic distributed copies).
Disclaimer: I'm a vacation rental owner who advertises on nearly all the mentioned sites, and before that I was a customer who stayed at vacation rentals.
One of the worst travel mishaps is accidentally double-booking a space. This is something that happened with frequency in the old old days - prior to the rise of large hotel chains - often enough that it is a plot device often seen in books and old movies. The protagonist finds they have to quickly arrange another place to stay, hijinks ensue.
Since hotel chains have come along, double-booking has become almost unheard of. They have many identical rooms, they're overbooked counting on people not showing up, as airlines do. But with this slight reversion (people are sick of generic hotels with little character and few amenities; the rush to stay in houses and apartments commences) the nightmare of double-booking is a possibility for the traveler once again.
On reviews via the vacation rental sites: Nobody is happy with the current review system at the vacation rental sites. Nobody. Search the http://community.homeaway.com forums to see the owners' side of this. The owners feel HomeAway is geared far too much toward helping the guests, who aren't the ones paying big bucks to use the site. The guests feel the company isn't allowing their voice to be heard when there's a true problem. As in this instance, good guests find they can't properly review a property. And good owners find they can't stop a wayward review from appearing on the listing they paid a lot of money upfront for. Both ends of this are exploited by the few bad apples - the owners and guests who lie for their own ends.
Yelp's model of reviews, on the other hand, has its own similar problems. Fair reviews by genuinely happy or pissed off customers end up filtered. Unfair, spammy reviews (whether owner plants or one pissed customer writing 12 reviews) don't get filtered. There is no 100% way to get around this. The companies whose websites accept, review, and host these reviews have to do the best they can, and keep working at perfecting the filtering mechanisms.
Having said all that, I think the author has a right to be pissed off. Finding you have no place to stay because the owner made a mistake is a nightmare. And he should be able to say to others looking at the property that the owner made a mistake and double-booked him (but paid him back on the spot - obviously, situations exist where the owner gets snippy and refuses: new level of nightmare). The fact that he can't state this publicly is a fault in HA's review system. But they also have a point - that's all he could say, because all that happened was that his space was double-booked. He didn't actually stay there.
What's the solution? I don't know. In a matter of dispute, a dispute resolution where an agreed upon statement of fact could be posted in the reviews might work. The place this idea would fall down is when dealing with the true psychos - the liars who are out to take your money (on the owning side), the liars who are out to threaten you into giving their money back (on the guest side).
Two years ago I tried to organize a ski trip for my then employer (Scribd). VRBO stats: I contacted ~30 places. Only thirteen called back, not even 50%. Of the 13 that responded (over a period of 9 days), many of them had sold the cabin for my desired time but couldn't be arsed to update the availability calendar. I managed to make it happen, but in the future, I can't recommend vrbo; it was an enormous waste of time. For Tahoe, you'd be far better off googling then calling the rental management agencies up there directly, because they at least have their shit together and can give you accurate availability.
Also, VRBO doesn't seem to take any responsibility for accuracy of the advertisements. The sleeps number, a key criterion for group vacations, is almost useless and not consistent across homes: some houses seem to think you'll stack sleeping bags like a jig saw puzzle in the living room.
The author did not book the property through Airbnb. Had he done so, he would have learned what we do in these rare situations. His article missed a couple key points:
1) If a host cancels a reservation on a guest, a default review is generated stating that the host canceled X days before arrival. The guest can modify this auto-generated review if he wants to add color to it.
2) The host is penalized monetarily if he cancels on guests more than once per 90 days. The penalty is $100 if the cancellation is within one week of arrival, otherwise $50. Hosts that repeatedly cancel on guests may be removed from the site.
As a result of these policies, host cancellations are rare. Most occurrences are honest mistakes and not from repeat offenders.