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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.

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    Typically reviews go online only once both host and guest have written their review (or after some time expires for the side which did not submit a review). Is it possible that could be happening here?
    – mts
    Dec 20, 2017 at 23:03
  • @mts I wrote the review 2 months ago.
    – Yehuda_NYC
    Dec 21, 2017 at 0:40
  • The duration seems to be 14 days, so yours should have posted already by my earlier theory. Then it might be that your review was not published since you did not actually stay at the property. I fully agree with you that this leads the review system ad absurdum and especially reviews such as yours should be published. Actually I also wonder why you were able to write the review if that were the case. Have you tried contacting Airbnb about this?
    – mts
    Dec 21, 2017 at 0:48
  • I recommend asking them for an explanation. I suspect it is a glitch. I am one of several people who refused to stay at a DUMP (to put it mildly) in Ireland. I don't know how it woks in Ireland, but in USA, there would be signs on all windows forbidding entry and it would soon be demolished. AirBNB did publish those reviews, the host didn't contest them, and yet AirBNB still lets him run four listings (been more than a year). I sadly found the only one of the four that had not yet been reviewed. (This seems irrelevant to the question, but it shows they DO publish negative reviews.)
    – WGroleau
    Dec 21, 2017 at 5:33

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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.

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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.

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