a better feedback loop between hosts & guests

5-star reviews are one of the primary measures of success at Airbnb – they mean a better experience for guests and ultimately, more bookings for hosts. When hosts were routinely getting lower review scores, we wanted to understand why.

Hosts would get >5 stars, but didn’t know why.

Hosts would get >5 stars, but didn’t know why.

 

Understanding the host experience

First, we met with hosts to understand their experience. While most hosts wanted to improve, it was hard for them to know exactly to work on. We also heard that sometimes reviews felt unfair – they impacted a host’s livelihood but lacked clear context why.

Solving the problem for hosts meant starting with the experience for guests.

We’d heard from hosts loud and clear. They couldn’t provide a better stay for guests if they didn’t know what wasn’t working in the first place. So our starting place for the project was guest reviews. We spent months revamping the guest review flow in order to collect more actionable feedback for hosts. We prototyped new ways to ask the questions in order to collect clear, honest responses from guests, and added structured tags so that, when something wasn’t a 5-star experience, they’d have to indicate why.

We created structured tags to describe the most common guest issues.

We created structured tags to describe the most common guest issues.

 

Using structured tags to collect better details

To create the right set of tags, we used data from thousands of guest reviews to understand the most common trip issues. We also included space for guests to collect other details or issues that we handn’t included in the tags.

Shifting the focus back to hosts.

Once we had a system in place to collect better feedback from our guests, we shifted our focus back to the host experience. Based on what we’d learned in research, we redesigned the way delivered guests feedback to hosts. The end experience we clear, actionable, and more encouraging – focusing on what hosts were doing right as well as what they could work on. It surfaced the most important details upfront and showed trends to provide more focus and weight to the experience.