What To Do If You Get a Bad Airbnb Review as a Host

If there is one thing I don’t like about vacation rentals, it is that you live and die by your most critical Airbnb and Vrbo reviews. Unless you have a nearly perfect review score (or at least over 4.8) people may think there is something seriously wrong with your property. The norm is for people to give 5 star reviews, but not all guests are aware of that norm. So if you get an overly critical guest (or you deliver a bad experience) a really negative review can sink the prospects of your listing.

I have some ideas about how Airbnb and Vrbo can improve the review process to return host burnout (mostly around removing the the impact of outlier reviews), but I’ll post that another time. In this article, I want to talk about what to do if your guest gives you a really bad review like a 1-star. It happened to us once and it was terrible!

When we first bought our home in Hawaii, our pool construction project ran over schedule because of torrential rains. As a result, when a guest checked in there was a muddy mess in the side yard (we paused construction while they were there and we hadn’t advertised to them there was going to be a pool on the property, but it was supposed to have been completed by the time they stayed as a nice surprise). We let the guest know ahead of time about this problem, but nonetheless they decided to stay somewhere else after seeing the muddy side yard. We gave them a full refund and they found a different place, problem solved, right?

Then came the 1-star review.

Because this refund took place the day of check-in, the guest was prompted to write us a review. Since they didn’t stay at the house and there was this issue, they us a very polite review, but gave us a 1-star. Since this was our 3rd review on the property, it gave us a horrible average.

After researching the Airbnb rules, we realized there is not a lot we can do. A guest can only change their review 48 hours after they write it. By the time we saw what they wrote (after we wrote our review of the guest), that time period had already passed. The guests review was all accurate and didn’t have anything that warranted Airbnb removing the review. If the guest wants to delete there review, they can do that, but they have to call the Airbnb customer service line and request that the review is deleted. Given that there are sometimes very long hold times for customer service, this is a big ask for a guest.

So, decided call the guest and explain our situation. The 1-star review was making it difficult for us to be able to operate and get guests. If they would consider deleting it, we would be most appreciative.

To our great surprise, the guest said okay. He would call Airbnb customer service and ask them to delete the review. After a few days, we got confirmation from Airbnb that review was deleted. Phewww, a happy ending in this case. The guest was a really nice person and happy to help.

So what should you do? If your guest gave you a bad review review, but isn’t really upset, I’d consider just giving them a call and explaining the situation. If the guest is upset and not really amenable to changing things, you are probably stuck with the review. I would be very careful you don’t do anything that could get you kicked off the Airbnb or Vrbo platform such as losing your temper and threatening the guest, offering them a financial reward for changing their review, or deleting your listing and recreating a new one from scratch. All these things carry huge risks of being kicked off the platforms.