Airbnb ratings are nominally on a 1–5 scale, but almost nothing lives below 4. Data from Inside Airbnb most visited cities put the median rating at 4.84. To make things worse, displayed ratings are rounded to the nearest 0.5 bin so this pushes up most listings to be shown as five stars.
For contrast, when researchers ran the same exercise across TripAdvisor lstings, that distribution was roughly centred on 4.0, with about 30% at 4.5 or better versus Airbnb’s 87%.
If everything is a 5 then nothing is a 5, and that’s why I don’t trust any of these ~~paid~~ reviews
I believe sites that allow ratings to be given both ways (host/guest) like Airbnb suffer from rating score inflation as guests are more reluctant or give mediocre or nuanced reviews in fear of retaliation. I’d honestly trust a 3.5 star hotel score more than a 4.5 star Airbnb one.
I’ve never given below a 5 on Uber because the last thing I want is to be given less than a 5 as a passenger then have people not want to pick me up
Since airbnb can review people who stay there I’m assuming that’s similar
We need to normalise using normal distribution, I.e most listings should be around 3, where 4 and above is reserved for top 10%, akin to Tabelog
Comeon folks, time to let them wither.
Holy fuck I didn’t know that below a 4.5 was considered FAILING and now I feel so guilty for all my “good but not perfect” 4 stars 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Maybe that’s because they delete non-5 star reviews? It’s a known fact. Plus guests are not accepted by many hosts if they lefr negative reviews before.
So this data isn’t that beautiful.
I stopped using AirBnBs years ago and went back to hotels. 24 hour concierge, no bullshit, and cleaning is included (unless you’re in Hawaii but that’s another level of suck).
I have also seen quite a lot of fake 5 star reviews on Airbnb which makes me believe people are gaming the system
Airbnb lost their way. Trash now
Maybe all the places that got 1-4 stars got removed
Lots of Airbnbs seems to delist and relist properties that fall below a certain line. Also I think they like to relist and have a friend “stay” to boost them to a 5.0 start.
We always try to stay at 4.8+, pref 4.9+, and have had good experiences by doing this
I think the fact that you have direct communication with the host makes a big difference in the rating. Also, AirBnB gives guests a chance for direct/private feedback. I’ve given 5 stars plus private feedback because i know it is an individual. Where I would have given three stars to a hotel for the same situation as there is an expectation that they should already know how to take care of these things.
Airbnb is the worst. No one owns the issues that arise.
I guess it’s hard to give someone a bad review when you have to look them in the eye.
The first time I tried to give a listing a three star rating for some very valid issues, my review was deleted ‘on request of the host’. That was when I pretty much lost all faith in the rating process.
Every Airbnb I’ve stayed at, I get a message from the host during checkout: “please leave us a 5 star review”.
AirBNB makes more money if more people use their service. More renters will use the service if they think the rentals are high quality. More owners will use the service if they keep getting business, no matter how shitty their rentals are. AirBNB thus has a strong financial incentive to manipulate ratings to be as high as possible.
My hypothesis is that the key distinction here is between P2P marketplaces like Airbnb and aggregators like Trip Advisor.
On the P2P platform, both parties are theoretically aware of each others’ performance.
Let’s consider the worst case scenario for both parties. Guest shows up at their stay, learns that host misrepresented it and it’s a dump. They’re pissed, but they came to party, so who cares? They trash the place and violate the hosts no party rule.
After checkout, both parties know they deserve a bad review. Each party knows if they receive a review from the other one, that it’s unlikely to be complimentary, and in fact that it will be detrimental to their standing on the platform. Therefore, both host and guest have a strong incentive to just let things slide and not report on each other, since they know that the other party will see that they left a review, assume it wasn’t positive, and leave a retaliatory negative review out of spite.
This is totally different than an aggregator like TA, where reviews are entirely one sided and there is no avenue for retaliation against bad reviews, so guests are more likely to let it rip and air their grievances.
It’s also possible that trip advisor hosts an objectively larger share of lower quality stays than does Airbnb. I’d go so far as to say this is a likelihood, but I doubt that it explains the vast difference in ratings.
It would be interesting to see how ratings across marketplace type differ. Besides platform mechanics, other relevant factors might include an unwillingness by people to directly criticize individual hosts vs corporate hosts, or an issue with inconsistent expectation setting across listings.
Airbnb also rates guests, so most guests will leave a 5-star review to get one back.
Airbnb rating system isn’t meant like a hotel rating though. 5 stars doesn’t mean that it’s the most luxurious or perfect. 5 stars means everything was as expected and as described in the listing. Less than 5 means that something wasn’t as the listing had described or shown.
I’ve travelled a lot over the last few years, and sadly I know for a fact now that Airbnb remove low ratings routinely.
It’s a way for them to attract more customers would be my hypothesis.
The quality of their customer service has diminished drastically as well.
Unless the reason for uniformly high ratings is that lower-rated listing are systematically kicked off the platform, this is trash. Either way, with nearly no differentiation in the rating scale, you may as well just get rid of it. Not a useful piece of information or filter criteria anymore.
I suspect that there is pressure at every stage. We have this unfortunate thing where somebody (Uber? And then everyone else) killed 5-star scoring, since anything < 5 is interpreted as “the worst”, making 5-level scores essentially a binary value.
Then there are social pressures and guilt for guests to rate highly. Pressures for hosts to get high ratings, often paired with overt requests for high ratings or bribes and discounts. And AirBNB likes having supposedly high-scored listings too, I’m sure.
It’s ridiculous, you need spread! If star scale ratings aren’t working anymore, you need to find something else. I’d also love a system that captured value, something might be realistically 5 stars for $200/night but 2 stars for $400/night. I tend to think these systems do better when broken down by line-items instead of an overall score. Rate it on location, cleanliness, value, amenities, whatever, and let the algo sort it out.
Yeah i don’t know what game they’re playing but i stayed at a 5 that was definitely not 5-worthee
Also Airbnb removes negative reviews. Don’t forget this is their platform. They are incentivized to keep places open and making money.
I was straight up told my own review was removed because…and I quote…the hosts were “elite” on the platform.
I don’t think people realize these companies get to decide how their ratings show up. They control everything. Amazon’s star reviews aren’t even averages of all reviews. They are based on their own proprietary algorithm.
This is why you choose the listing at 4.6 with 100 ratings instead of the 5.0 with 7.
![Share of listings by rating: Airbnb and TripAdvisor [OC]](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/1788332955-1080x1024.jpeg)
27 comments
Airbnb ratings are nominally on a 1–5 scale, but almost nothing lives below 4. Data from Inside Airbnb most visited cities put the median rating at 4.84. To make things worse, displayed ratings are rounded to the nearest 0.5 bin so this pushes up most listings to be shown as five stars.
For contrast, when researchers ran the same exercise across TripAdvisor lstings, that distribution was roughly centred on 4.0, with about 30% at 4.5 or better versus Airbnb’s 87%.
Source: Inside Airbnb (June 2026 scrapes); TripAdvisor comparison from Zervas, Proserpio & Byers, Marketing Letters 2021. Tool: Python (pandas + seaborn).
If everything is a 5 then nothing is a 5, and that’s why I don’t trust any of these ~~paid~~ reviews
I believe sites that allow ratings to be given both ways (host/guest) like Airbnb suffer from rating score inflation as guests are more reluctant or give mediocre or nuanced reviews in fear of retaliation. I’d honestly trust a 3.5 star hotel score more than a 4.5 star Airbnb one.
I’ve never given below a 5 on Uber because the last thing I want is to be given less than a 5 as a passenger then have people not want to pick me up
Since airbnb can review people who stay there I’m assuming that’s similar
We need to normalise using normal distribution, I.e most listings should be around 3, where 4 and above is reserved for top 10%, akin to Tabelog
Comeon folks, time to let them wither.
Holy fuck I didn’t know that below a 4.5 was considered FAILING and now I feel so guilty for all my “good but not perfect” 4 stars 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Maybe that’s because they delete non-5 star reviews? It’s a known fact. Plus guests are not accepted by many hosts if they lefr negative reviews before.
So this data isn’t that beautiful.
I stopped using AirBnBs years ago and went back to hotels. 24 hour concierge, no bullshit, and cleaning is included (unless you’re in Hawaii but that’s another level of suck).
I have also seen quite a lot of fake 5 star reviews on Airbnb which makes me believe people are gaming the system
Airbnb lost their way. Trash now
Maybe all the places that got 1-4 stars got removed
Lots of Airbnbs seems to delist and relist properties that fall below a certain line. Also I think they like to relist and have a friend “stay” to boost them to a 5.0 start.
We always try to stay at 4.8+, pref 4.9+, and have had good experiences by doing this
I think the fact that you have direct communication with the host makes a big difference in the rating. Also, AirBnB gives guests a chance for direct/private feedback. I’ve given 5 stars plus private feedback because i know it is an individual. Where I would have given three stars to a hotel for the same situation as there is an expectation that they should already know how to take care of these things.
Airbnb is the worst. No one owns the issues that arise.
I guess it’s hard to give someone a bad review when you have to look them in the eye.
The first time I tried to give a listing a three star rating for some very valid issues, my review was deleted ‘on request of the host’. That was when I pretty much lost all faith in the rating process.
Every Airbnb I’ve stayed at, I get a message from the host during checkout: “please leave us a 5 star review”.
AirBNB makes more money if more people use their service. More renters will use the service if they think the rentals are high quality. More owners will use the service if they keep getting business, no matter how shitty their rentals are. AirBNB thus has a strong financial incentive to manipulate ratings to be as high as possible.
My hypothesis is that the key distinction here is between P2P marketplaces like Airbnb and aggregators like Trip Advisor.
On the P2P platform, both parties are theoretically aware of each others’ performance.
Let’s consider the worst case scenario for both parties. Guest shows up at their stay, learns that host misrepresented it and it’s a dump. They’re pissed, but they came to party, so who cares? They trash the place and violate the hosts no party rule.
After checkout, both parties know they deserve a bad review. Each party knows if they receive a review from the other one, that it’s unlikely to be complimentary, and in fact that it will be detrimental to their standing on the platform. Therefore, both host and guest have a strong incentive to just let things slide and not report on each other, since they know that the other party will see that they left a review, assume it wasn’t positive, and leave a retaliatory negative review out of spite.
This is totally different than an aggregator like TA, where reviews are entirely one sided and there is no avenue for retaliation against bad reviews, so guests are more likely to let it rip and air their grievances.
It’s also possible that trip advisor hosts an objectively larger share of lower quality stays than does Airbnb. I’d go so far as to say this is a likelihood, but I doubt that it explains the vast difference in ratings.
It would be interesting to see how ratings across marketplace type differ. Besides platform mechanics, other relevant factors might include an unwillingness by people to directly criticize individual hosts vs corporate hosts, or an issue with inconsistent expectation setting across listings.
Airbnb also rates guests, so most guests will leave a 5-star review to get one back.
Airbnb rating system isn’t meant like a hotel rating though. 5 stars doesn’t mean that it’s the most luxurious or perfect. 5 stars means everything was as expected and as described in the listing. Less than 5 means that something wasn’t as the listing had described or shown.
I’ve travelled a lot over the last few years, and sadly I know for a fact now that Airbnb remove low ratings routinely.
It’s a way for them to attract more customers would be my hypothesis.
The quality of their customer service has diminished drastically as well.
Unless the reason for uniformly high ratings is that lower-rated listing are systematically kicked off the platform, this is trash. Either way, with nearly no differentiation in the rating scale, you may as well just get rid of it. Not a useful piece of information or filter criteria anymore.
I suspect that there is pressure at every stage. We have this unfortunate thing where somebody (Uber? And then everyone else) killed 5-star scoring, since anything < 5 is interpreted as “the worst”, making 5-level scores essentially a binary value.
Then there are social pressures and guilt for guests to rate highly. Pressures for hosts to get high ratings, often paired with overt requests for high ratings or bribes and discounts. And AirBNB likes having supposedly high-scored listings too, I’m sure.
It’s ridiculous, you need spread! If star scale ratings aren’t working anymore, you need to find something else. I’d also love a system that captured value, something might be realistically 5 stars for $200/night but 2 stars for $400/night. I tend to think these systems do better when broken down by line-items instead of an overall score. Rate it on location, cleanliness, value, amenities, whatever, and let the algo sort it out.
Yeah i don’t know what game they’re playing but i stayed at a 5 that was definitely not 5-worthee
Also Airbnb removes negative reviews. Don’t forget this is their platform. They are incentivized to keep places open and making money.
I was straight up told my own review was removed because…and I quote…the hosts were “elite” on the platform.
I don’t think people realize these companies get to decide how their ratings show up. They control everything. Amazon’s star reviews aren’t even averages of all reviews. They are based on their own proprietary algorithm.
This is why you choose the listing at 4.6 with 100 ratings instead of the 5.0 with 7.
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