'Perfect' dock at Ontario Airbnb suite submerged – but the company didn't allow a negative review

TORONTO -

A Toronto man is asking questions about whether a major home-listing platform is getting rid of negative reviews, pointing to his struggles to warn other users of a warped, sunken dock that looked nothing like the picturesque scenes in the listing.

Jordy Gold says when he tried to warn others that the reality at the suite was very different than what was advertised, his posts went nowhere, and he’s worried there’s a problem with the crowd-sourced review system that turned Airbnb into an internet powerhouse.

“It was all supposed to be wondering. We showed up and there was a complete disaster,” Gold told CTV News, saying a vacation at a “perfect getaway” he spent more than $6000 on was ruined because he believed the dock was unsafe for his two-year-old.

“We were shocked. We spent a year and a half getting to this cottage. It was so bad in so many ways, we didn’t know what to do,” he said.

Gold, who said he has had mostly positive experiences with Airbnb in the past, wrote a lengthy detailed review on the site that included, “the ‘amazing’ 30-foot dock had been completely destroyed and was unsafe for use.”

The review was not posted on the listing, and when CTV News Toronto checked, there were mostly positive reviews. The host didn’t return a message from CTV News Toronto.

Airbnb told CTV News Toronto that it took Gold’s review down because it failed to meet its standards for “relevancy.”

“There were a few details in the review that contained content that referred to circumstances entirely outside the host’s control,” said Aaron Swor in an e-mail to CTV News.

It’s not clear why parts of the review weren’t posted.

The company said in a statement, “Where a review contains information that is focused on something beyond the control of the person being reviewed, it may be removed. Airbnb does not remove specific sections of reviews found to be in violation of our policy, and instead assess the overall relevance so that Hosts are not unfairly penalized for issues that are outside of their control. Authentic reviews are part of the foundation of Airbnb’s platform, and it is rare for reviews to have to be removed, for any reason.”

A similar thing happened to Samantha Mayer. She says she posted a review about a dirty suite in a Toronto condo and followed up on Airbnb’s Facebook page with a laundry list of complaints including photos of stains on fixtures and brown marks on the toilet seat.

She struggled to find her posts when she went back and checked.

“The uncleanliness — it felt disgusting in there,” she told CTV News Toronto. “Whoever did get to see that review before it was gone, I hope they saw it. They shouldn’t be trying to silence people.”

Airbnb became a corporation worth tens of billions of dollars by finding a way for almost anyone to turn their home into a part-time hotel. They did that in part by using an online review system to help their community trust that the suites they rented would be as described.

“Reviews are important. They’re the backbone on which the sharing economy is built,” said Shreyas Sekar, an assistant professor at the Rotman School of Management and the University of Toronto Scarborough, who studies how reviews operate on online platforms.

Sekar said people are generally more hesitant in posting negative reviews, and even a single negative review can have consequences not just for the host, but also for the platform in general. He said companies have to weigh their policies carefully to strike a balance between positive reviews that are good for business and reliability.

“A lot of this depends on what stage of your growth you are as a platform,” he said. “When you prioritize growth, you may have a singular objective to become as large as possible. Later on, as is the case with Airbnb, you want to sustain your community and the focus has to shift from growth to policies that help every single user thrive on your platform.”

Both Mayer and Gold have received refunds of about a third of what the lodging cost them. After we asked Airbnb news about Gold’s case, the company told him it’s doing its own review of what happened.

Gold wants to be able to share his warnings with other people in the Airbnb community.

“What’s the point of the entire system then — this thing just spiralled from there,” he said.