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).
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).