How to prevent a retaliatory review on Airbnb?

You are in a tough situation, really, and there is nothing you can do. Booking.com does a better job here at making sure reviews don't weigh your property down, and the old reviews tend to not weigh as much as the new ones. They also have a metric so that really extreme reviews don't pull your score so much. But for Airbnb, you just have to let it go. 

I must also say Airbnb does a terrible job mediating these situations even if you try to fight the review. Very likely they might not remove it. 

I would turn off any automated requests for review. I would also use the feature where you can hold your review for them for the very last second: this has been one of my favorite Hospitable features for years as it essentially prevents them from getting the notification that you have reviewed them which would prompt them to leave a review for you. Additionally, if they try to blackmail you in any way such as asking for some money back in exchange for them not leaving a bad review, then you definitely need to screenshot that and use it if they leave a bad review. Airbnb should be able to remove it if those are the circumstances.

Here’s that delayed review feature ​@Eli Stoughton is mentioning: https://help.hospitable.com/en/articles/4604749-leaving-a-bad-review-for-a-guest

Well said ​@Eli Stoughton and ​@Homelike.ca !  

Any way that Booking.com bests Airbnb is fascinating!  I’m hopeful I can get a thoughtful CSR on the other end who understands the nuances of this guest and the fact that you can straight lie your face off about a hot tub and if the retaliatory embers were already there it seems to prove that the BS is indeed BS.

Let’s see .. . 

This sounds like such a frustrating one. Once a guest arrives already feeling wronged, I’m not sure there’s much you can do other than document everything, stay calm, and use the review tools Hospitable/Airbnb give you.

One thing we do when a guest is genuinely unhappy is ask them very directly: “What can we do to make this right for you?”

Sometimes they ask for a discount, and if that is what they feel would make things right, I almost always give it. What has surprised me is that no one has ever asked for anything unreasonable when I’ve put the question to them plainly like that. Most people seem to just want to feel heard and treated fairly.

We had one guest where a few unfortunate things happened during the stay that were outside our control. I asked what I could do to make it right for them, and they replied that they were just grateful I had asked. They didn’t want anything — and they ended up leaving a glowing review.

So far, I’ve never had a guest leave a bad review after we’ve had that kind of direct conversation and resolved it. The only one who did leave a bad review was someone who refused to engage at all — some people just prefer to keep the grudge.

More broadly, I do think goodwill created early in the stay can help. By that I mean small signs that you’ve paid attention: a bottle of bubbly if they’ve mentioned a celebration, genuinely good local cookies, high-quality dog treats if they’re bringing a dog, or simply something specific to why they’re staying.

None of that will fix every situation, especially if someone is determined to be unhappy. But when guests feel genuinely welcomed from the start, I think they’re more likely to interpret small issues as normal hosting hiccups rather than evidence that the host doesn’t care.

You’d be surprised at how many guests have such a bad attitude and just want to give you a bad rating. We literally had a guest from Airbnb stay, not mention a thing in the chat about any issues, only to turn around and leave us a 2 star review. And his review was “not bad”. We asked Airbnb to remove it since it really did not say anything about the stay but they didn’t care.

I’d be careful framing this as retaliation, at least from my experience.

We recently fought a 1-star Airbnb review where the guest had a self-created issue (locked themselves out around midnight), requested reimbursement for the locksmith, we declined, and then they left a damaging review. We appealed twice and lost. The biggest lesson was that Airbnb seems to define “retaliatory” very narrowly. A guest being upset about a denied refund does not automatically qualify as retaliation under their policy.

What I’d recommend is contacting Airbnb support now, before the review is left, and documenting the situation clearly: the non-refundable cancellation request, your denial based on the policy, the current hot tub complaint, and any evidence that the hot tub was serviced or usable. That way there is already a support record attached to the reservation.

Then, if they do leave a negative review, I would dispute it based on the actual merits of Airbnb’s review policy, not emotion. Look for specific policy hooks like irrelevant content, misleading claims, extortion/pressure if they threaten a bad review for compensation, or content that is clearly not based on the stay itself.

Unfortunately, “this guest is clearly bitter” may be true, but Airbnb probably won’t remove a review for that alone. The best move is to document everything now and keep all communication inside Airbnb. Airbnb support even sent me a YouTube link for a video that explains how to correctly fight a review like that. I think I may have won it if I did this before the appeal process.👇
 

This is definitely close to the top reason we don’t offer nonrefundable stays through Airbnb and their silly discounts for such an offering. 

For something like this, have you considered arbitration ​@codytraxler ? 

​@anthonyrallo We haven’t considered that, and honestly didn’t know that was even possible 😂. 

We’re not very concerned about that specific 1-Star review as this listing is a unit in our boutique hotel. Airbnb is one of the many channels that we use and the listing is still performing well. I’m leaning on the algorithm to do its thing with this being the only 1-star review we’ve received in the 3000+ Airbnb reservations we’ve hosted.

I took it as a frustrating experience that led me down an AI rabbit hole to create a ChatGPT project for my “Strategy Lab,” where I’m now deep diving into the niche published topics on the Airbnb.tech knowledge bases. There’s some crazy cool new stuff out there! 😁

Also what I have noticed is that its gotten harder to get reviews removed.