It is a problem, but it's also partially self-inflicted.
Compare reviews on Steam to reviews on Airbnb. You'll quickly notice something, Steam shows you far more information at a glance. You get to know whether someone bought the game themselves or if it was given free to them, how many hours they played before the review, how many hours they played in total, their rating, how other people feel about that review, how many other products the user has, if the review was edited, and of course review text.
Airbnb's reviews has a scoring system that was generalized, and review text, maybe a translation badge if the review was translated.
Reviews work best when you are given as much information as possible. Without it, you might as well be relying on an anonymous 5 star system.
Steam Reviews really should be a model for everyone else imo. They still have problems such as review bombing, but they are way better than anything else.
You can also only review an Airbnb once you have stayed within. Difference of opinion, I do not find the game examples would be relevant or safe to disclose in the scope of an Airbnb review.
It seems like Airbnb is doing the gamification and manipulating it as well. I’d rather all reviews stay, good and bad and let the consumer decide for themselves. As soon as some reviews get promoted and others hidden I stop paying attention to them
> I’d rather all reviews stay, good and bad and let the consumer decide for themselves
That's not a realistic solution.
If all the reviews were fake 5 stars but it's just the property's friends always leaving reviews then when you got there, you feel there's no way it's 5 stars. But less obvious is property manager says, hey i'll give you a 5% discount for 5 stars, when really the place was a 3-star at best.
Those shifts in star ratings are material in your personal decision making process.
Is there anything currently in place that prevents the 5% off situation? Seems like nobody is able to solve that one. Or wants to tackle it.
Airbnb is incentivized to have higher scores because lower ratings might not push people to other properties - it might discourage them from booking all together. They need them to not be totally worthless, but score inflation is definitively in their best interest.
You should also be able to give extra weight to reviewers that broadly line up with your own reviews. That way; the things that are important to you will show up. It also incentivises you to leave honest reviews.
In my mental lazy file there’s a company called antipode that is able to find people with opposite and like reviews and can help people identify and avoid items.
So you can basically collect people who review in ways that are useful to you and layer that over the web to rank search results, apartments, blenders, etc etc.
> To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem.
True but also one they’ve created for profit. They choose to ignore complaints about hosts to avoid losing their fees, they choose not to audit reviews, etc. There’s an entire industry of people who get paid to do mystery shopping to review customer experiences, which is quite effective but not free since you can’t automate it at scale.
This seems like it’s basically a VC playbook now: focus on growth numbers and assume you’ll be able to convey the shiny tech imagine until you reach market dominance, and avoid spending money visibly on “menial” jobs to support the image that you are about to be unbelievably profitable.
> To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem.
I wonder if "tipping" could improve things.
A new platform like airbnb could have an expected tip built in to the platform. Hosts are expected to provide good service and get a tip.
Customers are encouraged to tip at the end of their stay (with a lower base price than airbnb to account for that).
Hosts can see the average, median, max, and min tips of potential customers (along with distribution, and percentage calculations) and use that to determine whether to accept them as a guest.
Customers can see the average tip a listing received, and use that to determine if they'd want to stay there. Of course, they would sometimes leave $0 or a low number as a tip, but they'd be incentivized to also provide good tips for good service, because a low tip average would reflect poorly on them and make them less likely to be hosted.
I suspect tying things to real value for the customer and host would lead to better service and a more honest indication of host/customer quality.
But perhaps it would just lead to hosts literally bribing customers for good tips.
Do you then also get ran after you when you don't leave a tip on top of the service fee the restaurant charges? Pretty crazy experience that was in the USA
Oh god please no more tipping. It's spreading like a virus. Each time I visit the USA there's more pestering for tips from every possible angle. Just pay people a fair wage already.
I don’t mind tipping, as it incentivizes people to perform better than standard work. I can’t see being forced to pay 20% to someone that can bring food on time for instance. Either way, this is Airbnb, the owner of the property sets the “wage”.
This is the correct stance to take. I've been to other countries where tipping hasn't been implemented, and the service and quality has _always_ been worse than in the grand USA.
I’ve actually been to Japan, I’m not sure how their service is substantially better than the US. the restaurants I went to you order from a kiosk and get the food yourself. There really is no service to tip for. One restaurant I went to was a mom and pop and there was some service there as they struggled to find forks for us. We tried to tip and they counter tipped and gave us the small beer glasses we were drinking out of.
Southern conservative states in the US have much better service than in Japan, because it's authentic and enthusiastic. Other countries service is adequate, but there is always a tinge of resentment and jealousy of us here in the US.
Personally I hate tipping. Long term it just makes everyone frustrated. Socially, it used to be 10% now the bare minimum is 15% if give 18% people then people start becoming happy.
Now I'm forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list...
> Now I'm forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list...
If the industry moves to service included, then the prices will still be 15-20% higher, or more, than they are today. You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however.
Multiples of 5% calculations is pretty simple and keeps the brain sharp. It’d also be easy to show the price with tips, but dark patterns.
So then how do you make people care enough to do a good job if there is no monetary incentive? Should the employer cover this? That’ll will still end with the same, increased prices.
Also this has been tried before, and was widely considered a failure. People don’t like surprise fees, inflated prices, etc. They don’t mind tipping as it gives them some control back.
My job also “tips” me. Every year if my manager likes my work from the previous year then I get more RSUs. If they don’t like my work, then I don’t get RSUs (and maybe fired). Tipping is everywhere.
> So then how do you make people care enough to do a good job if there is no monetary incentive? Should the employer cover this? That’ll will still end with the same, increased prices.
Increased prices are what it should be, just as it is in every business outside of tipping culture. Tipping culture is not the same thing as increased prices.
> Also this has been tried before, and was widely considered a failure.
It works just fine in much of the world. It even works fine in the US where foe some things normally covered by tipping culture, a flat fee in lieu of gratuity is applied in certain circunstances (e.g., restaurants do this with largw parties quite often.) It works just fine in places with tipping culture in all the customer service jobs that are arbitrarily outside of its coverage.
> My job also “tips” me. Every year if my manager likes my work from the previous year then I get more RSUs. If they don’t like my work, then I don’t get RSUs (and maybe fired). Tipping is everywhere.
Incentive pay from your empkoyer is not a culture of tips from your employer’s customers.
> Increased prices are what it should be, just as it is in every business outside of tipping culture. Tipping culture is not the same thing as increased prices.
The market said no.
> It works just fine in much of the world. It even works fine in the US where foe some things normally covered by tipping culture, a flat fee in lieu of gratuity is applied in certain circunstances (e.g., restaurants do this with largw parties quite often.) It works just fine in places with tipping culture in all the customer service jobs that are arbitrarily outside of its coverage.
That’s great, but it didn’t work in the US. Some of the larger corps ran the experiment for 4 years and when the waiters lost income they complained. You see, here tipping culture means they make more money.
> Incentive pay from your empkoyer is not a culture of tips from your employer’s customers.
It’s exactly the same. It’s lay I would not have received otherwise.
That’s true. Another reality is that there are bad actors on the customer side too. A single person who gets off on being awful to people can leave an unwarranted bad review and materially harm an Airbnb host’s business.
There's no good answer to this. Anyone that allows/relies on direct consumer feedback is at risk for one of the hardest problems that exist.
Personally, I want to know people's great and real experiences, or terrible ones, who wouldn't!? But, once you tie it to money, it's over.