Couchers is officially out of beta

This is just hospitality reviews 101. I run a couple of Airbnbs in the uk - 99.9% of guests leave gushing reviews, 0.01% break open locked cupboards and are like “There was a cupboard FULL of cleaning supplies! Disgusting! 1/5!”.

I’ve even had people bring a plastic rat with them and pose it around the apartment to then complain to customer service - successfully. That one cost me about £5,000 in a refund, lost revenue as I was made to cancel bookings until I had a pest controller in, and a mystified but still expensive pest controller.

Pareto’s law is pareto’s law.

I think the difference between Airbnbs and couchsurfers is huge. Couch surfing is a voluntary yet free service provided by someone out of the goodwill of their heart. Airbnb is provided for profit. Leaving such reviews is fine for an Airbnb (assuming it's deserved ofc), but certainly not okay for couch surfing.

It does depend what they've reviewed though. Is the person hosting living in a in a gross apartment vs the towel designs are not nice.

Scam plan: know someone in Airbnb customer satisfaction team > rent expensive Airbnb accommodation > make bogus complaint complete with faked pictures to support bogus claim > have the claim approved by acquaintance > share profit.

The “profit” you would be sharing with the person in Airbnb customer satisfaction in your hypothetical scam is a refund of your money which you would have paid to rent the place. This is like Homer Simpson’s grease business.

Some people are just plain...weird? I was reading reviews of some book on Amazon (can't remember which one now). Someone gave the book a one star review, because "it was delivered two days later than it was promised" while simultaneously saying they haven't read the book. How is it the book's/author's fault that Amazon delivered the book late? Why are they giving lowest rating for a book without even reading it? None of this makes any sense

Just consider it a tax on the amount of damage your business did to local housing costs.

In that case, the reviewer seems to have completely misunderstood the subject of the review. That's a fine review (I guess) if the subject of the review is Amazon and the purchasing/delivery experience. Of course, it would be obvious from reading the review that it's not useful to somebody looking for book reviews and it should be (re)moved, but for whatever reason we have accepted platforms such as Amazon will simply fail to handle it properly.

These are selfish, immature people. They exist all over and the reason why we can't have nice things.

i would hope by now such reviews are heavily down-weighted on the back end as far as contribution to the overall rating displayed for a given product. seems relatively easy to automatically detect and I struggle to see why Amazon would want deflated reviews for products they're selling.

maybe it's a legal thing, could be viewed as market place manipulation i suppose. and they've certainly had enough worries about anti-trust already.

Honestly, part of the overall ordering experience has pretty much always been included as part of the review on Amazon. It's weird that people take such umbrage with it. It may not be the author's "fault" but that's part of having your products on Amazon. I want to know if the product won't be delivered in a timely manner or if it won't be packed correctly.