Brutal Airbnb Reviews: What NOT to Do as a Host

73% of guests determine whether or not they will book your property within the first 30 seconds. My team and I have hosted thousands of thousands of guests. And so naturally, we've seen thousands of listings over the years. We've seen a lot of really good ones, but we've also seen a lot of really bad ones, and those are still out there. And so today we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to pull up some real live listings and we're going to uncover why they have dropped the ball, why these listings are incredibly bad and and what they can do to make them better. If you're a host out there, this is your chance to learn from the worst.

Welcome back to the show. I'm glad you're here. Today I'm reviewing some real live listings where hosts are leaving thousands of dollars on the table for some really easy to fix mistakes. And I'm going to show you what they should have done instead. Here we go. Listing number one, a magnificent title to start things off. Four kings, four queens, large house. Obviously, this is the best title, right? We know that the way you should be doing your title has changed over the years, but one of the things that hasn't changed is you shouldn't have the word house in your title, right? This is valuable landscape. You only have so many words to catch potential guests eye or attention. And we know right below looking at the property that it's clearly a home. Airbnb will designate your property type right below. So we can see home right here. So no need to have house there. We can also see that it has all of the bedrooms right in there, eight beds. So I would instead uncover some things that are unique about this property, some amenities, some things that we can't see right from just looking at the very beginning from Airbnb's listing description, your title really should be another place for you to sell your property. Things that they can't see. So let's look at these photos. The first one is a bedroom. Kind of looks like a living room, though, because there's a fireplace right next to it and there's all kinds of lights going on here. We've got this like, fluorescent blue light that screams late night club or disco. And then right next to that, you have other lights, like some Christmas lights on the fireplace. There's just a lot of lights going on here. But the picture itself obviously is not professional. It's super dark. The second photo here, bedroom two, is even darker. There's like a tiny little lamp in the corner. And that's it. Like, there's just. Just really bad. I mean, even with a smartphone these days, you can take much better photos than this. So again, another bedroom with some crazy disco lighting going on. Yeah, these photos are just not inviting. Here's a nice bathroom shot with a partially used toilet paper roll and a nice, wide open toilet seat. We know that we want to keep those clothes. We know we want fresh towels and everything like that in our bathrooms. Here's a few more shots. We've got a nice outdoor shot, and I say nice in a sarcastic way. This is covered with leaves and an old dirty artificial turf thing going on here. A bunch of leftover house parts in the garage. The garage really does kind of look like a dungeon. And there's a laundry machine in there. So I guess the idea was to show that they have laundry. What I would do instead is just take a picture of the laundry machine and say that it's down in the basement. I mean, this was just not inviting at all. And then the photo tour ends up with a shot of the initial photo, but those disco lights have changed. Instead of being blue, now they are red. So obviously we don't need all the crazy lighting going on. We want professional lighting. Open, natural lighting is the best way to go. Clearly, these photos were taken with someone's camera and it wasn't professional at all. We can see by the reviews 27, they're at a 4.5. Not too great, is it? So let's check out some of the reviews here. Now we know, like, if you drop the ball somewhere accidentally with your property, you can make that up with really good communication. Right? We know that we can have a property that's not perfect or even the nicest one in town, but you can have excellent reviews as long as you set the right expectations and you respond to things appropriately. So here we are on the reviews. I'm just going to read off just a couple here. For example. So upon arriving, there was trash left in the back, overflowing from one trash can. And actually a lot of these reviews, I just took a glance before. Mention the trash. We've talked about this before. This can be a challenging piece of the housekeeping operation. Right. If your housekeeper is cleaning the property and the trash is only picked up on Wednesdays, sometimes they leave too much trash out there. So there are other services out there. We talked about one called Can Monkey that'll actually pick it up for you. But if that's not an option, then you can't leave trash at Your property, especially if this is like one of the first things that. That someone's seen. So you want to make sure that you pay someone to go back to take out the trash. Right. So there are a lot of bad reviews in here. Talking about cleanliness and dirtiness. This one says the outside was in horrible disrepair, but no response. At least having a response would provide some additional background or context to help future guests. Right? Like, oh, I'm really sorry, my housekeeper was not able to pick up the trash that week. We've already set up a new structure to where it gets taken out every Wednesday when it should be there. You know, something just to address future guests. Okay, so that's one piece here. The other thing, I mean, we can see there's not a lot of sections filled out. Like, there's no information on the neighborhood. It's just not very complete. Not a lot of effort went into this property. Let's go ahead and jump into the next one. This one titled Spacious Beauty Minutes from su. So that must be the college there in New York. So spacious, not the best term for a title, Right? That's really just used all over the place. Again, we want to just be selling amenities. So not bad. Putting minutes away from su. They might want to include the exact amount of minutes in the title. This is a new property. It doesn't have any reviews yet. If we click on the photos, these are a little better. Again, still taken with a camera. That's really obvious. And a lot of these are pretty empty. Like, I'm looking at one of the bathroom right now with no towels, no nothing to make it feel inviting, no shower curtain. It just honestly looks like a space that someone was maybe trying to rent on a long term basis and took a couple quick photos and said, you know what, maybe I'll try this on Airbnb and see what happens. I got to give them credit. They added a couple photos of related activities here. And we know that that's really important. Right, because when guests are staying at your property, they don't just choose your property for just the property. They also choose it many times because they want to visit some of those local attractions. So it's good to see those here. Again, some. Some not great, nasty bathroom shots here. We can see the mirrors showing the reflection of the ceiling. That's got like light fixtures with no cover on them. The linens here, this is one of those easy fixes. Just have all white linens. This is what the hotels do. This lets your guests know that the beds are clean, that the towels are clean because you can see if a white linen or towel is dirty, right? And so a dark comforter like I'm seeing in these photos is just not that inviting. Here's another bed shot. It looks like someone was just sleeping on this bed. To be honest, it's very wrinkled. That's a really easy fix. I mean, even if you're taking these with your own phone, you can do a better job than this, right? Just spend an extra hour to add some table settings, to fluff some towels up to make sure that your bed's not completely wrinkled, to open the blinds and let some light. And some of these photos are kind of crooked, right? I mean, they're showing a whole bunch of the ceiling when they should be showing the living room. You'll know if you worked with a professional real estate photographer, that they use wide angle lenses to capture the whole space. Imagine if your guest is only, as we said, spending a few seconds looking at your listing and instead of just showing a piece of your living room, you could show the whole living room, but not multiple photos, just with one photo that happens to be a wide angle lens. So again, one of the reasons you got to make sure you're working with a professional photographer. So this is a brand new listing, very obvious. Not a lot of thought was put into it. Let's go ahead and jump over to listing number three. So here we are, listing number three. Obviously photos are still not good, but at least they set the table right. And it looks like a pretty decent renovated space. The title, they use two words out of the full area that we're given. You want to use all of the space that you have and you want to front load it with the most important words for your title, which should be adding something to your property. We got to remember, like half the people that are going to book your property are looking on the mobile version and your title will get cut off around 35 characters. So we could definitely add more than just Crescent Hideaway, which is the name of this property. One thing really stands out to me on this property, aside from the really negative review score 4.2, it's the review responses. So this person came back and left. Review responses but in a very argumentative way, which would basically lead anyone to believe that booking this property in the future, that you know, if something doesn't go right or perfect, that this host probably is not going to be the biggest help. Let me just read a couple of these examples off. So here is the guest review. It says, first I'd like to say that Alicia was very forthcoming and prompt with her communication. I had some trouble actually quite a long review response. And I'm going to save you that time and just jump to the owner's response. It says first and foremost. So this is not a great way to start a conversation. Right. This is very one sided, my way or the highway type of conversation. We have cameras all around the property and what you're stating with kids banging on the doors did not happen. I can prove that. Second, the whole home is brand new. Everything is brand new. So they're basically just arguing with what this person has said. We know that that doesn't work well, never do that. But we also know that it's really hard for us as owners, as hosts to separate ourselves from guest communication. We love taking over for you if you don't want to do this. And we can be that middle ground where we're always going to respond in a very professional way. It's never going to deter any future guests. But if you're doing this on your own, give it a little bit of time before you respond or review. If you've just read a bad one. Use ChatGPT to make sure that it's polite. Like, this is not helping this listing at all. Here's another review. It says this place was clean and cozy. It felt like it was renovated a week before. All new. The only issue was the area felt a little sketchy. And then the owner responds, in other words, Nick is referring to the fact that the home is in a culturally diverse neighborhood that is completely safe. We can't change the world unless we change ourselves. I'm not making this up. This is a real review response. How would that ever help a future guest book your property? The answer is wouldn't. So here we are going through photos on the same listing. They did a good job. They put out some flowers and place settings and things like that. But these are definitely home taken photos. Some of them are really crooked. Again, they're not using white linens. They do have some freshly rolled towels. Some of these images are really small, like just a shot of lemons. I mean, we could take a bigger shot of the kitchen. So we got to make sure we're using those wide angle lenses. So yeah, we can laugh about these bad review examples that we just went through. But the sad reality is that some of these issues, like not completing your listing descriptions, taking bad photos that aren't professional, not responding to reviews or responding in the wrong way, having a title that doesn't help sell your property at all. These are all too common in the short term rental world. These are easy fixes. Remember, the details matter. And great hosting is about making every stay unforgettable in a good way. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.