I agree it's not the same, but AirBnB profiles with a long list of positive ratings as a guest play a similar role. "This person slept under my roof, acted well, and treated my home with respect". When I advertised my apartment for a sublet on Craigslist, I received a couple AirBnB profiles and considered them pretty compelling as references. I ended up subletting to one of those people, and they were great.
The dynamics are such that bad reviews are rarely given by host or guest. The flow is carefully tailored to produce this result. As a guest especially, why complain about a place you’ll never revisit when the payback could be a negative review of you that makes it more difficult to use the service?
As mentioned by another comment, both host and guest submit their review before seeing the other's review. And they rarely interact again. Having looked at many property listings, and stayed at places with marginal reviews, I'm quite sure bad hosts get bad reviews. And I am pretty sure the same is true of guests.
Furthermore, guests and hosts submit a review a very high fraction of stays, and one cannot submit a review without actually hosting or actually spending substantial money as a guest, so AirBnN avoids most of the problems that Amazon reviews have.
You could make the same argument about Couchsurfing.
But actually, on Airbnb you can't see the review of the other person before both have submitted their review. That ensures that neither party retaliates.
Does AirBnB provide a “super-guest” filter, or equivalent so that you can brainlessly and reliably filter for suitable guests?
I would host independently minded guests that don’t want/need hand-holding, and guests that are vetted for being socially respectful (tidy, no 3AM drunks, etcetera). My property is tobacco and alcohol free, which surprises friends, so I can imagine strangers being disrespectful.
Do trustroots.org or movingworlds.org provide filtering? I really never want to have to trawl through reviews, because I find it wasteful and also I think reveiwers tend to avoid writing anything truthfully negative (allusions and omissions might occur, but are not always obvious).
it's funny because when it comes to any real disputes, AirBnb sides with landlords as much as possible (and as much as PR will allow), because that's who are they getting the money from. The guests are just the 'meat' in the machine so it would be more consistent if they allowed property owners to vet guests even more to avoid any issues/disputes in the first place.
For RoboCat's case - it does still allow to not accept a certain guest after looking at hteir profile etc, but IMO that's too far into the journey - it'd be better from UX perspective and satisfaction if such a guest never found the property as available in the first place.
> [because they are getting the money from landlords]
Which is weird, because of course the money comes from the guests.
I have seen the opposite dynamic when it was a buyer's market with real estate: the vendor is paying however the agent was actually helping the buyer (to the detriment of the vendor). Real estate agents make their money from volume of sales, to a first approximation.
