During a recent stay at an Airbnb in Brazil, my host invited me to eat a traditional local snack of pão de queijo and have tea. It was a lovely gesture, but it was 10 p.m. and I had arrived from an 18-hour bus ride through the countryside earlier that day.But when gauging whether to go to bed or be friendly, I had to consider another factor: My Airbnb rating. The app lets hosts and guests rate each other on cleanliness, friendliness and “overall experience.
‘People are playing a game and pretending it’s a lovely social exchange when it is, in fact, a business exchange.’ —Russell W. Belk, a professor of marketing at York University “People are playing a game and pretending it’s a lovely social exchange — hosts sharing local tips with guests and guests sharing knowledge and skills from their native land — when it is, in fact, a business exchange,” he said.
Elliott himself quit Airbnb more than a year ago after a host decimated his average rating, giving him a 1 out of 5 star rating for forgetting to return the keys. He said it was an honest mistake and overnight mailed them back the next day, but Airbnb threatened to kick him off the app after he got the negative feedback.
“Even if they are awful, rude, bad at driving, et cetera, it makes me anxious that a bad rating may cost them their job,” she said. “It feels weird that people in the service industry aren’t allowed to have an ‘off’ day now.” Hosts and guests hope to earn positive accolades in the form of smiles, five-star reviews and fictive relationships. Marian Makkar, an assistant professor at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, has studied this phenomenon. A dual-review system is “unlike anything consumers have experienced before,” she said, and that the intimacy may prevent consumers from being honest in their reviews in a way that traditional models never did.
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