Airbnb's Broken Review System!

What's up everyone? Thanks for watching Millionaires Are Made. This is gonna be about Airbnb's broken review system. I know a lot of you are Airbnb hosts. Some of you are getting out of it. I know that the bubble has burst and everyone's exiting, but for those of you still in it, this review system sucks. It's a very interesting, very broken process. Reviews are pretty much the lifeblood of being a host, and they're absolutely necessary to success. Right? Yeah, guests now have learned this and they abuse it constantly. It's not that fun for hosts. Extortion runs rampant. Hey, pay me $50, I'll give you a good review. Otherwise, I'll give you a bad one. Airbnb doesn't seem to give a shit as they always side with the guests. I currently operate roughly 50 listings across the USA and we get— I've seen everything. I've seen it all. We have our own software that we manage all our listings, which is helpful, and it does use automated messaging and automated reviews. So... So about an hour before they leave, hey, can you leave us a review, this and that. And then if we don't change it, it leaves them a 5-star review saying, hey, great guest, thanks so much. Now if they're a bad guest, we go in and we have to manually remove that and leave an honest review about whatever they did. Yeah, so that's fun. About an hour before checkout, we message them automated telling them, hey, please leave a review, we're gonna leave you one, it's gonna be great, we're all gonna have a happy hunky-dory day. Sometimes this is when they decide to lodge complaints. Oh, 5 days ago it was too cold and the heater wasn't working. How the hell are we supposed to fix 5 days ago? Oh, uh, yeah, the lock has never worked. The door just sits open all day. Why have you not told us this before? Oh, it wasn't clean when we checked in 2 weeks ago. There was hair on the porch. All right, great. Then they demand a sort of refund. This isn't every case. This is maybe 10%-ish. A common one's not enough silverware. We didn't have enough silverware or enough towels. Like, we actually have an entire closet, if you had looked, with extra towels and extra silverware because some people don't wash any dishes and some people like to use a new towel after every time they wash their hands or take a shower. It's a brand new towel. And so we have it for those guests too. But they still decide to go ahead and leave a bad review if we don't give them their 50% or exorbitant amount back. We need $1,000 back because there wasn't enough towels. Well, there are in the closet if you just asked. Oh, we didn't Didn't know, so this experience was bad. We'll have to leave a review about it. It's crazy. Then you go to Airbnb and say, "Hey, they extorted us," which is illegal. But Airbnb says, "Eh, whatever." It's in their policy too. They say extortion cannot be done. They ignore you. They put you off. They tell you it's not their problem. Yada yada. They go through hundreds of excuses that Airbnb has to continue their track record of the absolute worst customer service of any company out there, even Comcast. I'm not kidding. Now some hosts, they just expect it and call it the cost of doing business. They just expect to lose towels, lose silverware, and they just say, oh well, that's part of being an Airbnb host. You just get stuff stolen from you all the time. Now if a guest has been an issue from the start, which is easy, we cancel the automatic review as I mentioned earlier. They come in and they're already complaining about a hair on the porch or the lock doesn't— the millions of things that some guests do. They do it on purpose. You have 24 hours when you check in. Airbnb just extended that to 72 hours. 72 hours to make a complaint and you can get a refund. Sometimes you can get a refund and technically Airbnb made a policy that the host has to pay for your hotel. So if you come in and say there's a stain on a pillowcase and you take a picture of a random pillowcase or download it from the internet and you go to Airbnb within— you can stay for 2 full nights, have a nice sleep, enjoy the house, could be a $1,000 a night mansion, and then say, oh, when I checked in there was a stain, I need a new listing. Okay, here's your hotel and the host has to pay for it. That's the their policy. They're gonna be changing it very quickly because there's no way that's gonna last. They'll lose every host out there. So if they start off and they have a bit of a problem— we've been doing this for near over a decade— you can usually tell the guests are gonna abuse this system. So then we cancel the automatic review and we wait and do it ourselves. You know, they, they know what they're doing, and so we, we have to do our part too. We've had guests that have shown up and said, oh, we can't stay here, the neighbor parks their car past 8 PM And it's too loud for us. I have no idea what to do. Like, there's nothing you can do. Go ask the neighbor, hey, please don't come home from work past 8 PM. You can only work till 7:30 starting now. It's, it's crazy what they ask for. Yeah, we've had guests walk in and they find a hair on the porch and they ask for a full refund. We can't stay here. Nope, there's, there's dog hair. I'm allergic. It's on the porch. I don't know where it blew in from, but there's nothing we can really do about it. It's, it's crazy. But those are the guests you don't really want anyway. So usually we just say, hey, get out of here, leave a refund. Unless it's like a house that takes forever to book. I mean, like our 6-bedroom mansion, it's like, I think it's $1,200 a night. That one, yeah, we can't book that in an hour. So that one we probably would have to consider it case by case. But if it's just a room in a busy city like Dallas or Atlanta that is easy to book, then we would just let them do that. We don't really want them around for the next 12 hours anyways. Should we— this is great. We've even had a guest that broke the window at before check-in time because they really wanted to set their stuff down and it was hot. So our check-in is, I don't know, I don't remember, 3, 4, 5 PM, something like that. They got there early and had to get in the house before we sent them the code. So they broke a window. Then they complained to Airbnb of broken glass all over and that the AC didn't work. We were like, what the hell are they talking about? So we checked it out and we're like, you've been staying here for 15 hours with a broken window? And then we pulled up the cameras and saw, oh, you broke the window and now you're asking for a refund. Airbnb did, I believe, side on that one with us, which is lucky. Um, it's pretty crazy. We find like asking guests an hour or 2 before checkout is best. It's the best policy. We have our messages automated. We follow up again the day after checkout. Hey, just hopefully you got back home from your trip. Uh, can you leave us a review? It's really important to us. And then 13 days later, because Airbnb has a review period of 14 days, so the last little touch, we're like, hey, you just haven't left us a review. Is there any chance we can get one from you? Because basically without Without it, we get screwed. We leave our review as soon as possible so that as they're like, you know, in the airport or driving home or whatever, like, oh yeah, let me go leave that real quick. So hopefully it spurs their mind and makes them remember. That's what we hope. We see that's the best result, but it's tough to get reviews from people for sure. Most difficult part is the requirement. I mean, we spend so much time trying to get people to review because without reviews, you're a nobody on Airbnb. You're ranked last, you get no bookings, you have to lower your prices, where you just have low occupancy rates and it's impossible. We have a 97% occupancy rate, and if we had bad reviews, that would go down to like 70%. We'd probably be out of business, which a lot of people are right now. I know it's tough. A lot of people are moving out. But it takes away from energy to be a good host. We're so worried about, hey, get this review, get this review. We need to have— oh, they said this place is awesome. Cool, that's a 5-star review. And then it becomes annoying with us just asking rather than Airbnb coming up with another system that doesn't really have to do with that. So instead of being a good host, and happy and friendly. We are annoying as hell. And, you know, sometimes we ask 3 times for a review and some people get mad. That's too much, stop asking for it. It's like, well, we have to. Like, I have to have a Superhost status. We have to have, you know, Premium Plus listings. We have to have all this stuff that Airbnb requires. And a lot of that comes down to the reviews. And bad reviews destroy you. I mean, you can get listings deactivated. I remember we had a brand new listing. I think we had 2 5-star reviews and the 3rd guest had something happen. So they left like a 1-star review and then they deactivated our listing after like 3 weeks. It was insane. But bad listings also make you go down and, uh, down in your search algorithm so people don't see your property. All sorts of things. So bad reviews absolutely kill it. And so you have to do everything you can not to. But then you have the double-edged sword. Now guests take abuse of that. I had— we had a guest came in and expected us to drive him to Walmart to buy stuff for the weekend. He goes, hey, is there like a razor and mouthwash and I need like some clean shirts. Do you guys do you guys provide? Like no, you're renting a room in a house. He's like well, I need a ride to Walmart. Cool, here's an Uber code. Save you five bucks. Oh, I don't have money for that. I need you guys to come take me. Like unfortunately, we can't do that. And then he left a review, a one-star review because we wouldn't go drive him to Walmart to buy things. It's it's a wild world. That one I believe we got removed hopefully. But yeah, here's the number one thing: guests don't even read the listing, and we have bad reviews for this, and Airbnb will not remove. All over our— all of our listings almost. So we— like, when you go on Airbnb, you have to choose private room, shared room, or whole house. It's like basically the first question you choose. Do you want to rent an entire apartment or an entire house to yourself private? Do you want just to rent a room in a house where you share it with the host or other people or something like that? Or do you want to share a room where like there's multiple beds in the room, like a hostel? And all those are options. You have to pick them. You would not believe how many people come into one of our houses that we rent them out by the room and come in and see another guest, get pissed off, call Airbnb and start yelling when it's literally the first choice that they had to make. I thought we had the whole place to ourselves. And then they leave a review and Airbnb like probably 50% removes them. So we have a lot of negative reviews because someone chose to book a private room in a house and then got mad that it wasn't an entire house. Like $50 a night, you think that's what whole houses go for in Denver, Dallas, any of these metros, any city? I don't know any city you could get like a 3 or 4 bedroom house for $50 a night. It's wild. And they leave those reviews. We try to fight them and they It just doesn't happen. It's crazy. Nothing we can do about it. All right, I'm done venting. There's Airbnb's broken review system. Somebody somewhere do something about it. Fix it for all the Airbnb hosts. The whole system would be 10 times better. I'm out. Millionaires are made.