12

An airbnb reservation fell through when I showed up and the apartment I rented was occupied. I got a refund immediately. I wrote a review describing what happened and saying the airbnb rental was in a somewhat seedy area. I can see the review I wrote when I go to my reviews, but I cannot see my review when I go to the apartment listing. The host has 10 airbnb rental units. I am wondering if airbnb has deep-sixed my review so as not to hurt an active host. Do you know the airbnb policy on publishing reviews? Is it an honest policy, or is it biased in favor of hosts?

Update: I sent Airbnb an email asking why my review was not displayed. (This approach was suggested by a reader here.) It has been well over a week and Airbnb has not responded. So it appears Airbnb does censor the reviews. In this case, it declined to publish a politely worded and well-deserved negative review.

Yehuda_NYC
  • 1,992
  • 3
  • 18
  • 30

2 Answers2

5

I hosted on airbnb. Wording of airbnb rules are flexible on purpose. Only airbnb staff anonymously or a host that has been on the other side of such a situation can give reliable answer.

I can confirm that it is not necessary that the guest has actually stayed at the airbnb for comments to be published. When I hosted, a guest canceled on the evening of his expected arrival since he couldn't make it. I was prompted to leave a comment for him, explicitly despite his cancellation. It was too late for him to be refunded, though. In this instance neither of us published a comment, so comments if written could still have been hidden I suppose.

Kate Gregory
  • 82,075
  • 14
  • 237
  • 340
JDoe
  • 99
  • 3
4

Officially, no, they won't censor them. From their help on the subject:

Can I delete or respond to a review I disagree with?

You can respond to reviews, but you can't delete them. To promote trust and transparency in our community, we won't delete reviews unless they violate our content policy.

If you think a review written about you is false or exaggerated, you can write a response that will show up directly below the review and be visible to other guests and hosts.

To respond to a review:

Go to Edit Profile on airbnb.com
Click Reviews
Select Reviews About You
Find the review you’d like to respond to and click Leave a Response

Note: You'll need to write your response within 14 days of when the review was posted.

If a review written about you includes any personally identifying information about you, please see our content policy.

Mark Mayo
  • 160,001
  • 106
  • 687
  • 1,492