Removing Bad Airbnb Reviews (Updated Host Strategy)

Getting a negative review on Airbnb stings and it can also feel impossible to get it removed. But what if you understood how Airbnb's dispute process works today versus how it used to work? The Airbnb dispute process isn't broken, it's just not based off emotional arguments anymore. Today's episode I'm going to break down some actionable strategies, the evolution of Airbnb's dispute process and some tips that you can use in the real world to help you fight AI driven technology behind Airbnb and make sure that which you don't have unfair reviews on your listing. Stay tuned. The impact and a negative review can have on your listing performance or your property performance in the short term rental world is massive. Most all of us know that it can tank our visibility. Meaning if you have a bad review, the amount of people that actually end up seeing your property after that bad review goes way down. And we can see that in Airbnb's insights and their listing impressions. But it's not just the negative review that really impacts performance of our property because there's a bit of psychology that goes on behind the review scores and what future guests leave. If a past guest has left a bad review, then unfortunately yes, future guests are more likely to leave bad reviews. This really stings when you have a review that is not fair, that is not true, it's not accurate, and so getting that review removed is super important. And yes, that is possible. So in today's world, Airbnb still has a lot of policies that if they're broken, you have a much better shot at getting these reviews removed. And some of those things are I'm just going to read off my list here, but hate speech, anything like that, any sort of threats, discriminatory language, any sort of bribe, like hey, you need to give me a discount or I'm going to leave you a bad review. Anything that's not relevant. And so this could be your neighborhood, for example. Remember, the review has to be specific to your property and if someone doesn't like your neighborhood, well, that's out of your control. And then we also have sometimes, and I know this sounds a little crazy, where you have guests that have left reviews for your property that haven't actually stayed in the property. And I have a personal story of my own. I'll break that down here in a second and also how we got that review removed. Let's talk a little bit about the evolution of Airbnb's dispute process. First, our team's managed tens of Thousands of guests over more than a dozen years. And we, we've typically had a really good success rate at removing negative reviews. So around 2023, we were getting about 40% of all of our review disputes removed. So taken off our profiles and we of course disputed all kinds of reviews. Anything less than five stars, really. We know if you have less than a five star average or the lower you go, the more your visibility drops, the less people find you and the worst your property does. So yes, we try to get every review removed that we possibly could that wasn't a five star. And we had a good success rate at that. It was about 40%. Now, from 2023 to 2024, quite a few of the rules changed with Airbnb and we realized that we weren't getting as many reviews removed, and so we stopped submitting as many requests. But the requests that we did make, we were still getting about 40% of those removed. And then this big change came along in 2025 and Airbnb introduced their AI dispute process. You are speaking with a support agent at Airbnb. Your dispute goes in the hands of the AI. So what does this mean in 2025? Well, it means that much less reviews are getting removed and you've got to cut straight to the facts. No storytelling, no emotional involvement, just cut straight to the facts. So you, or your team, or your property manager, whoever's helping you with your property, you've got to learn to speak AI Today, our team is still disputing reviews each and every day. We manage a lot of properties, so we have have a lot of reservations coming in. And remember, we're disputing anything and everything we can that's not a perfect five star. But our rate has dropped a lot. Unfortunately, we're down to a little over 7%. Now, don't get completely discouraged because keep in mind, if this is a one star review, you know how many reviews it takes to bring your average back up to a 4.9. If you had a perfect five, it's dozens and dozens of five star reviews. So each review that you can get removed really can go a long way with the performance your property. In today's world, if your dispute is declined, well, it doesn't come back with a lot of context, a lot that you can do to resubmit that dispute and have a better shot. It really just kind of comes back with a generic denial message. So even though our review removal percentage rate has dropped a lot, it doesn't mean there aren't a lot of things that we can still do to actually prevent these bad reviews in the first place. And I have some really good tips, some you've probably not thought about. But before we jump into that, I want to talk about a review that we recently successfully removed. And this one's going to blow your mind. So we had a last minute reservation. The reservation was actually made after the check in time. Now, Airbnb flagged this one and they actually canceled it before we could do anything. That guest left us a one star review. He never checked into the property, he never saw it, he never stayed there. He left a review saying that he had really bad check in experience. Of course he did, because he never actually checked in. Now it's up to us to still remove that review, even though Airbnb was the one that canceled it. Luckily, with proof of timestamped messages from Airbnb system, we were easily able to get this one removed. But isn't that just kind of crazy? Like Airbnb can cancel review on your behalf. Someone doesn't actually stay at your property. They leave you a one star review. Unless you actually go in there and want to get it removed yourself or go through that whole support process. It could end up staying on your profile, which is completely unfair and will very, very likely affect your performance. So in the real world today, what actually works to help get these reviews removed? Well, you have to use Airbnb's exact policy terms. You need to attach platform proof. So actual messages, any sort of insights from a resolution, maybe that got filed. Anything that comes directly from the platform, you need to match that with specific policies that are being broken by the guest. You can use terms like the guest lied about XYZ or the guest was pressuring us to xyz or the guest is retaliating due to xyz. Remember, your first dispute attempt is the most important one. If that doesn't make it through, then it's very likely your second attempt won't either. And that is one thing that we've changed in our strategy over the years. We used to save a list of all these potential things that could get a review removed. And we just go through the list. We'd start with the first one. If that got denied, we'd resubmit and we'd go to the second one. If that got denied, we'd resubmit and go to the third one. Unfortunately, that doesn't really work anymore. So what can you do today to make sure that you're not getting these negative reviews? Well, one thing that you can do Proactively is if you have a guest that's staying at your property and things don't seem that great with the guest out of your control. Right. Your property is perfect, the expectations are perfect, and this guest is just a little loopy or has crazy demand and you're suspecting that they might be harsh with the review that they're going to leave. Well, you can call up Airbnb support and ask them prevent that guest from leaving a review before they've actually left one. This has worked for our team. It's a great way to be proactive. Try that out if you haven't already. Of course, you can use AI to help you file these disputes from your end as well. You can simply copy all of Airbnb's policies. You can copy a review and you can have AI generate a review dispute for you. If you're new to the channel, we have a lot of resources that you can get for free@str riches.com Our AI prompt guide is one of those and we have these review dispute prompts in there for you. If you don't want to create it on your own, just jump over to cr riches.com you can get a free copy. So let's say you did get a bad review and you couldn't get it removed. What can we do to make sure it doesn't crush our visibility and crush our future performance? Well, the first thing is you want to make sure that you're responding to that review in a very positive way. And so what we like to do is the the sandwich method. Let's say that someone checked into the property and they said the bed wasn't comfortable. We want to thank them. So we want to start off positive. Thanks, John, for staying at our property. We're glad you had a great time. We're really sorry the bed didn't quite meet your expectations. As much as we'd like to have a different bed for all the different sleeping styles, we can't. We really look forward to having you back in the future. Do you want to start positive? You want to address the actual concern? And you might do that by, in this example, saying you have a Tempur Pedic mattress or the mattress is only a year old and you wish that it would have accommodated them. Something that's not going to deter a future guest from wanting to book your property. And then you want to follow that up the bottom part of the sandwich by saying something positive. We're glad that you loved your stay. Overall, we're really looking forward to Having you back next time. The other thing that we're going to want to do if we get a bad review, we need to monitor our visibility, right? So on Airbnb specific can do this under their insights. And if your visibility has fallen off because of a bad review, well, then you have to adjust your prices, right? Or you have to adjust your flexibility with that listing. Maybe you have a more flexible cancellation policy. Maybe you now allow instant book, maybe now you allow pets. But ultimately it usually comes down to price. And we know if there's less people viewing our property that we have less demand and we're not able to charge the same amount. You may have to adjust your prices a little bit if you're in a market that's seen a lot of supply increase over the years. Another thing you might want to consider is being a little more flexible on your minimum night stay requirement. Let's say it's three days or four days or even a week. Well, the time it's going to take you to build up a lot more positive reviews and bury that old one down in the bottom of the list is going to take much, much longer, right? So maybe consider lowering that minimum night stay requirement down to just one night, having excellent service, getting a bunch of good reviews, and then you boost that minimum stay requirement back up when that negative review is buried way down the list and future guests aren't going to see it or they're not going to put as much weight on it. If you're new to the show, we've talked about all kinds of things related to managing short term rentals. Our team manages properties in over 10 countries and dozens of cities. We have a lot of experience. If you're interested in getting a little help managing your property, we'd love to chat with you. You can go to Strict, There's a partner with us button and someone on our team would love to talk with you about your property and see how we might be able to help. We've also talked about reviews and the whole guest experience process a lot over the years. A couple episodes, you might want to go back and check out number 286. We talked about what prior review history is telling your future guests and sort of the psychology behind that. And if you go all the way Back to episode 183, we talk about how you can earn 5 star reviews with a less than perfect property. So negative reviews aren't going to define the performance of your property. Of course, if you're getting lots of them, it absolutely will. But how you handle those negative reviews, whether you're getting them removed or you're proactively responding to them, or you're preventing someone from actually making the review in the first place, that's all going to impact your visibility a lot. So with today's AI systems, we have to follow the AI rules. Remember, you can use our ChatGPT prompt to help you dispute these, but we have to make sure that we're playing by their rules. So yes, there's a lot we can do to be proactive and make sure we never get these bad reviews in the first place. If we are getting bad review, we want to make sure that we handle that appropriately. We may even reach out to support to try to prevent someone from leaving a bad review. But when it comes to actually dispute some reviews sometime in the future, remember that strategy and evidence are going to be your best bet in this aid driven world. See you in the next one.