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- Does anyone care about reviews?
Is that an important topic to anyone?
And the general question that came from you
and comes up quite often is
what is Airbnb doing to improve the review system?
Right, how can we make this better and fairer?
So we know that you all rely on reviews
to grow your business.
It's incredibly important
and we also know that you sometimes get reviews
that you believe don't really reflect the quality
of the experience that you provide
and there's a whole range of these.
Some of these are slightly unfair.
Some of them are like completely egregious.
And I know that it's very personal
when you receive a review, that reaction.
As I mentioned before,
I've been encouraging everyone on our team to host.
Right, like you have to get that experience.
One of the senior folks on my team started hosting.
She bought a house with a unit
just so that she could do this.
She was so excited,
she put so much work into it,
and then she hosted her first guest.
And guess what happened?
Three star review.
And the guest wrote
"Everything is lovely.
"It was a beautiful place."
And in the private review they said,
"You didn't have any bakeware."
And of course she didn't list that she had any bakeware
and of course, I mean, she's a new--
She would have run anywhere to buy bakeware,
for this guest that had just,
you know, experiences like that.
It is important that guests and hosts
can share from their own perspective
what they think is important to that experience.
It's important that we do that.
We don't want to place too many limitations on it,
but it's our job to ensure that, as much as possible,
reviews are really honest reflections
of that community member's experience
and that that review is actually useful
to future hosts and to future guests.
So one of the things we know is frustrating
is when a guest gives you five stars
in every category,
like cleanliness and accuracy and so forth,
but then a two-star rating overall.
So now there is a tool,
I don't know if you've seen this,
that automatically detects these types of reviews
and then actually interrupts the flow
to flag it and say,
"Are you sure you want to leave a two-star?"
Let me show you what that actually looks like.
"You rated your overall stay
"lower than you rated in subcategories
"like accuracy or cleanliness,
"do you want to change your overall rating?"
And actually quite often people say,
"Oh gosh, yes, I did make a mistake.
"I will change that."
So that's one thing that's already live.
Another thing that's over is some of our categories
like location and value are a bit more subjective,
right, and sometimes you get someone irrelevant things there
and what we do then is we interrupt
with a clarifying question.
So, for example, if someone leaves a low review on location,
we will ask,
"Was the location accurately described in the listing?"
And so that prompt we raise now
and the other one, which I'll show there,
as well is for value.
So if someone leaves a three star, we just sort of say,
"Well what would have made this a better value?"
So we're doing little prompts to guests.
There's more that we want to do educate them
around the fact that, for example,
a four-star review is a really big deal for hosts
even though it may not seem like a really big deal
for guests.
So these are a couple of things that are already out.
Now for what's to come.
So we've written a new review policy
that's gonna help with a couple of different types
of negative reviews.
These are the things I hear the most from hosts,
that you guys get the most upset about.
So that's what we're rolling out.
The first is for what we refer to as irrelevant reviews.
And this is where a guest leaves a review
which doesn't make sense
or they didn't really have any information for it
or that it's irrelevant.
Let me give you a few examples.
So one example might be
that a guest never actually checks into your space
and then they leave you some really weird feedback,
like the couch was too yellow.
Right, like that.
They never even checked in, how could they leave that?
So that's the type of review
that again doesn't happen very often
but when it does, it's really annoying.
So now the teams will be able to remove that review
and the star rating.
Another example might be if a guest leaves a comment
that's really unrelated to the service you provide
or your listing,
like a comment on your religion or your appearance.
Those would be removed.
Also, if there's something
that's really beyond your control,
'cause sometimes people are like,
"Oh, you know, New York was really cold."
Right, that's like, or
"really noisy in the city."
Right that's not actually helpful feedback, right,
that two of our criteria are
it needs to be helpful and useful.
That's not actually helpful.
So for example a guest leaves you a bad review
because it snowed too much
or if some nearby construction
caused a power outage during the stay,
again that's not really helpful information
to future hosts and guests
so we will remove those.
Or another example may be
if a guest accidentally leaves a review on your profile
for another host.
These types of things happen
so that's the first category
which we are calling irrelevant reviews
and now the CS team will have a set of policies
where they can support the removal of those reviews
if those happen.
The second category is around,
and again this doesn't happen very often,
but it's painful when it does.
When a guest might try to leverage a review
to get something that they want.
For example, they might say,
"Well I really want late check-out
"and if you don't give me late check-out,
"I'm going to leave you a bad review."
So that review is not helpful
so the team now will be empowered to remove that review
and that rating under the new policy.
- Can I?
- Yes, go ahead.
- Can I ask how you would know that?
- Great questions!
So document, document, document.
As much as possible,
make sure that your messages are on the platform
in the messages,
even if they send you a text,
respond to them on the platform because when you do that,
our agents know, they can see it really clearly.
So that's the best way to respond.
- Sometimes I'll tell them while they're visiting,
and they need something, they can text me
for a very fast response
but if it's anything pertinent to their stay,
I'll be taking a screen shot and sending it
through the messenger.
- What do you do?
So I had someone tell me on the phone before
that they wanted--
It was like the last day of their stay
and they wanted a full refund
or they're gonna give a bad review.
So then I put it in the Airbnb app,
but it wasn't them actually saying it in the app.
- Yeah, so what I would probably do, Ian you can jump in,
I would probably send them a note on messenger and say,
"I heard you on the phone say these things
"as you know that's not okay."
And whenever I have, like you can kind of
take that conversation to messenger.
Would you?
- Yeah, exactly.
- But what if they don't respond on messenger?
- You still documented it. - Yeah
- Like at least there's - You have to do that.
- some evidence evidence for the host to look at
and if they, I mean if they haven't responded,
that also gives some information that the agents have.
- They would have responded and said,
"No, I didn't ask for that."
And things like that in the new
guest standards will be flagged as behavioral issues.
- Exactly
- So this won't cover all these cases,
you will still sometimes get a four-star
that seems a little wacky.
Guests know that, right,
like they see all the reviews,
they expect to sort of a wacky review every now and then
and that's actually not a big deal.
So tips that I've seen from hosts,
and I'd love you to add in anything else,
the first is always be respectful.
Say thank you for your feedback.
Right, 'cause future guests will be like,
"Okay, clearly this is a very polite host."
Next clarify any misleading statements.
For example, if someone says your place was too cold.
You can say something like,
"Just to clarify, the instructions for turning on the heater
"are in the house manual."
Right, and third, you can also highlight any actions
that you've taken to adjust an issue.
If someone says they ran out of toilet paper,
you can say, "Okay, thank you for the feedback,
"I've purchased backup toilet paper to ensure
"that doesn't happen again."
Right, and I think you guys all know this
or you wouldn't be super hosts if you hadn't learned
how to respond to that type of feedback
in a really thoughtful and constructive way.
But for new hosts starting out,
I think there's some good things to keep in mind.
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