

'Reputational' Media—Where Yelp Has an Edge Over AirBnB, VRBO, etc. - TWAndrews
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/reputational-media-where-yelp-has-an-edge-over-airbnb-vrbo-etc/250574/

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nathanblec
Hi folks, I'm a co-founder and the CTO of Airbnb.

The author did not book the property through Airbnb. Had he done so, he would
have learned what we do in these rare situations. His article missed a couple
key points:

1) If a host cancels a reservation on a guest, a default review is generated
stating that the host canceled X days before arrival. The guest can modify
this auto-generated review if he wants to add color to it.

2) The host is penalized monetarily if he cancels on guests more than once per
90 days. The penalty is $100 if the cancellation is within one week of
arrival, otherwise $50. Hosts that repeatedly cancel on guests may be removed
from the site.

As a result of these policies, host cancellations are rare. Most occurrences
are honest mistakes and not from repeat offenders.

~~~
mschaecher
I also work at Airbnb and would like to follow up on what Nate just said. Our
review system is actually stronger than all the aforementioned sites because
it is transaction based, i.e., only people who complete the transaction
through Airbnb can leave a review.

Non-transaction based review sites like Yelp, VRBO, etc., are plagued with
fake reviews by owners, guests, and competitors. On sites like that, how do
you know that those glowing reviews you just read weren't written by the
owners, their staff, or their friends? You don't.

By tying our double-sided review system to actual transactions you can have
almost complete confidence that the reviews you are reading are the result of
someone staying with, or hosting, another member of our community.

We have reached out to the author of the article to articulate this, but rest
assured, had he booked through Airbnb he would have been able to write the
review he wanted.

In addition to that, he wouldn't have sent money blindly to someone. We would
be holding it until after he checks in and reminding the owner via email of
the booking to prevent exactly this kind of situation from happening. And in
the rare occasions when it does, our 24/7 customer team would have stepped in
and helped to find him a new place or issue a complete and fast refund.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Sorry, but no. If I was an unscrupulous host and wanted to boost my listing,
the first thing I'd do is have a bunch of friends (or fake accounts) book
nights on my listing and leave glowing reviews. I'm out maybe $100 for Airbnb
fees and now I have a slew of awesome reviews. What are the odds that this
doesn't happen all the time?

~~~
pg
Do you really think the Airbnb guys haven't considered this possibility?

People who do that sort of thing leave lots of tracks they don't realize
they're leaving.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Like? If I emailed a few friends around the country and asked them to help me
out like that, how would Airbnb know?

I'm not saying they haven't considered it, I'm saying they can't stop it.
Making the claim that a transaction based review system is inherently
trustworthy seems either naive or disingenuous.

------
foxit
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).

------
nano81
Why did you change the title? The author didn't make any claim of Airbnb
filtering potentially negative reviews. Airbnb didn't allow him to post a
review in the first place since he didn't actually end up staying in the room
(which I think is a reasonable policy that covers 99% of cases just fine). The
point of the article, and what the original title of the article conveyed, was
that there are some situations where this is not optimal and where Yelp's
review model has an advantage.

(Edit: Fixed now)

------
smhinsey
This is something I've been wondering about as I've noticed increasingly high
stakes items being reviewed on sites like Yelp.

For example, I'm trying to figure out where I want to move next and it's
commonplace for high rise apartment buildings to be on Yelp, but now that
we're talking about a $25,000 lease rather than a $40 meal, the incentives to
play around with the sentiment of the reviews are significant, as well as the
potential financial reward for doing so. How can we trust the neutrality of
the venue in these circumstances?

~~~
kd1221
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."

When you understand that Hemingway quote, you will realize that all ratings
services are inherently useless when it comes to the value of trust. In the
case of Yelp, there really isn't any reason to trust them when their
[financial] existence is maintained by the businesses that are reviewed on
their site.

So when you're about to decide where to take your parents for Sunday dinner
when they come to visit, don't reach for your iPhone. Go to a nice part of
town and walk into a restaurant and be seated. And in the case that you don't
like your parents, just take them to Denny's.

------
Duff
Yelp? Yelp is the home of people who post stuff like "they didn't serve
chicken fingers!" for Sushi restaurants.

A fundamental feature/flaw in the apartment/house rental place is
inconsistency. You're dealing with one rental owner by proxy via some listing
joint. If you want consistency and reliable reviews, go to the Hilton and
check TripAdvisor.

------
gurgeous
I too had a bad experience with a vacation rental and was unable to post my
review to VRBO. That's why I founded Dwellable, a vacation rental site. Here's
the full story on GeekWire from a few months ago:

[http://www.geekwire.com/2011/hawaiian-beach-vacation-hell-
sp...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/hawaiian-beach-vacation-hell-sparks-
urbanspoon-cofounder-start-dwellable)

This behavior on the part of HomeAway (VRBO) is really a natural consequence
of their business model. When the property manager is your only customer, it
doesn't make sense to post negative reviews.

We're doing things differently at Dwellable, of course.

------
prodigal_erik
There are complaints out there about accepted VRBO reviews going away later.
Yelp has even been accused of proactively offering this as an incentive to
spend (perilously close to a protection racket). And of course there's nothing
AirBnB wouldn't stoop to with Blecharczyk involved.

It seems to me we have a need for a fully independent system of reviews with
some kind of social trust metric (maybe degrees of separation) and technical
measures to prevent them from being silently unpublished by anyone (maybe
signed authentic distributed copies).

------
ashaunak
I also feel there is inherent conflict of interest when users post negative
reviews at sites like Seamless, Grubhub, AirBnB, VRBO etc. As these companies
receive revenues from their partners they might be biased against negative
reviews. It would be interesting to see some statistical analysis between
reviews on Yelp and reviews on these sites on the same merchant (restaurant,
property manager etc.).I would not be surprised if the analysis shows that
some of these sites have an artificial upward bias in their reviews/ratings.

~~~
Lucadg
I'm not so sure. Bad reviews give credibility to these websites. Imagine a
rental website with only good reviews.

------
ig1
It sounds like his review was blocked as a side-effect of a rule aimed at
something else (fake reviews), rather than an attempt to filter bad reviews.

------
earl
VRBO sucks as a rental seeking user.

Two years ago I tried to organize a ski trip for my then employer (Scribd).
VRBO stats: I contacted ~30 places. Only thirteen called back, not even 50%.
Of the 13 that responded (over a period of 9 days), many of them had sold the
cabin for my desired time but couldn't be arsed to update the availability
calendar. I managed to make it happen, but in the future, I can't recommend
vrbo; it was an enormous waste of time. For Tahoe, you'd be far better off
googling then calling the rental management agencies up there directly,
because they at least have their shit together and can give you accurate
availability.

Also, VRBO doesn't seem to take any responsibility for accuracy of the
advertisements. The sleeps number, a key criterion for group vacations, is
almost useless and not consistent across homes: some houses seem to think
you'll stack sleeping bags like a jig saw puzzle in the living room.

~~~
foxit
VRBO sucks no matter who you are. We don't use that site. (We do use HomeAway,
who bought them out, but they're being maintained separately.)

VRBO's sucktitude is summed up quite nicely by clicking on any state:

 _New Feature Alert! You can now see the availability for each property in the
search results. Simply enter a date range and hit the "Apply" button._

Yes, that's a new feature. They didn't have it before. But they'd like us to
pay $600 to be listed for a year.

