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She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

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Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#61

Post by gnicholas »

kstrauser wrote: post #58
gnicholas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it depends somewhat on where the unit is located. If it's in a downtown area with half a dozen coffee shops within a few blocks, maybe it's not necessary. But if it's in the suburbs, then yeah coffee is pretty much required. I wonder what percent of people make use of provided coffee. Some people are pretty strict about what kind of coffee they like, and wouldn't want to use whatever is provided. And some…

“Lovely room, but I have to get up and dressed before I can get caffeine, which makes me subconsciously associate it with a headache and stuffy sinuses.” A study I just looked up said 74% of American adults drink coffee every day. Of those, approximately 9 of 10 would prefer not to have to leave the house for their morning eye-opener, and 1 in 10 prefer papercuts then lime juice in their eye. Seriously, no innkeeper…

Thanks for sharing those facts. As someone who has never drank coffee regularly, I don't know the extent to which coffee-drinkers would prefer to roll out of bed and drink whatever is on offer in the unit, versus getting dressed and grabbing a Starbucks/Peets/etc. a few minutes later.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#62

Post by kstrauser »

gnicholas wrote: post #61
kstrauser wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Lovely room, but I have to get up and dressed before I can get caffeine, which makes me subconsciously associate it with a headache and stuffy sinuses.” A study I just looked up said 74% of American adults drink coffee every day. Of those, approximately 9 of 10 would prefer not to have to leave the house for their morning eye-opener, and 1 in 10 prefer papercuts then lime juice in their eye. Seriously, no innkeeper…

Thanks for sharing those facts. As someone who has never drank coffee regularly, I don't know the extent to which coffee-drinkers would prefer to roll out of bed and drink whatever is on offer in the unit, versus getting dressed and grabbing a Starbucks/Peets/etc. a few minutes later.

It’s all personal preference, of course. For me, unless the place next door was spectacular, I’d much rather have a cup of mediocre-or-better coffee to sip while I’m getting ready.

The best situation is having a decent cup while I’m washing up, then a mind-blowing cup a little later while out and about.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#63

Post by dventimi »

irishloop wrote: post #14

I once gave an Airbnb 4 stars because I was annoyed they had no way to make coffee, even though it was basically a hotel being run as an Airbnb. Like, not even a cheap Keurig in the lobby They DMed me and told me that was bullshit and if I wanted coffee, I should've filtered by that amenity Which is amazing because coffee is so expected you can't even search by it

And yet coffee isn't so expected that there isn't a setting for it in a listing's amenities. It's quite the contrary. In fact, there are settings for both "coffee maker" and "coffee", there for anyone to see who takes the time to see. Your AirBnB was in the right and you were in the wrong.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#64

Post by dventimi »

kstrauser wrote: post #40
lakpan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean… they’re not 100% wrong.

Nah, they're 100% wrong. Maybe a coffee maker isn't as fundamental as, say, a stove or refrigerator, but I'd be unhappily surprised if the place I booked didn't have one. To my recollection, I've never been somewhere without coffee. It wouldn't occur to me to filter for such a thing. Should I also be looking for places that have pillows? I do see what you're saying, but that's an expected basic amenity.

You may expect that as an amenity but nobody else is obliged to share your expectation. The fact is that AirBnB provides hosts the ability to try to SET expectations about amenities, even ones as mundane as a coffee maker. Given that, I'd judge this guest to be wrong, not their host.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#65

Post by fsckboy »

Eisenstein wrote: post #59
fsckboy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in a normal distribution, you expect the mode to be at the mean to be at the median. If that's where most hotels are, and most restaurants, welcome to what 5 objectively means.

You expect that people will rate most things to be 5s based on averages, since if you aggregate your best experiences as 10s and your worst as 0s, then most everything is a 5, right? But human brains don't work like that. We don't compare a dinner at a restaurant to literally the best dining experience we ever had or a trip to a theme park with the birth our child, so you can't realistically expect people to operate…

yes, and that's why figuring out the distribution of your opinions and normalizing them to convolve them with the rest of the raters will extract useful information from your ratings.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#66

Post by flir »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #41
nomilk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if we could make a browser extension that stores and presents amazon reviews. Could be useful to fill gaps on other sites too, for example when an uploader turns off comments on youtube. It would be a pretty big middle finger to amazon if the primary site for amazon seller reviews was not actually amazon, but a third party site/app.

Yeah I've been wanting to have that "comment on anything" for a while. It's possible in technical theory. But sharing the comments would be hard. Federation might work. Spam moderation could be hard. And most websites refuse to go into iframes, so your options are limited to browser extensions, SOCKS proxies, and Opera Mini style apps that re-render the page. Which means you'll get less than a percent of a percent of…

Ditto. I imagined it like leaving a post-it note on a page. If you found a fix for a product you could leave a note on the company's FAQ page. Problem is spam, in all it forms. Can you imagine political pages?

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#67

Post by Eisenstein »

fsckboy wrote: post #65
Eisenstein wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You expect that people will rate most things to be 5s based on averages, since if you aggregate your best experiences as 10s and your worst as 0s, then most everything is a 5, right? But human brains don't work like that. We don't compare a dinner at a restaurant to literally the best dining experience we ever had or a trip to a theme park with the birth our child, so you can't realistically expect people to operate…

yes, and that's why figuring out the distribution of your opinions and normalizing them to convolve them with the rest of the raters will extract useful information from your ratings.

According to your logic we should be failing half of all school classes because half the kids shouldn't be above average.

Not many people are going to think that a system which weights everything to be distributed that way is useful as a metric for evaluating human experiences.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#68

Post by bambax »

gnicholas wrote: post #4

I've heard from establishments after leaving reviews on several occasions. Typically they will either offer a free meal or a refund of the unsuccessful meal. I will update a review to let people know that I was taken care of, but I haven't ever taken down a review. I would consider doing so if my experience had been one-off, and I understood that it would not happen again (e.g., if an employee acted terribly and was…

Airbnb lets hosts remove bad reviews. It happened to me once, and it killed the whole Airbnb experience for me (I never used it again since).

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#69

Post by Buttons840 »

kstrauser wrote: post #45
Buttons840 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leave a 5 star review, get your gift card, then change or remove your review. If this was done often enough nobody would even try buying reviews.

That's an option. Still, it's not worth the small amount of money, to me, for a skeevy vendor like that to be able to say that they've paid me. Like, I don't judge. And when I was younger and broke half the time, I might've leapt at the easy money. I just wouldn't do it today.

It's not about the money to me either.

I see it as, somebody acts unethically, and I can either (1) go along with their unethical behavior and personally benefit and encourage further unethical behavior, (2) refuse to participate, or (3) refuse to participate and discourage the unethical behavior.

You choose 2 and I choose 3.

Re: She Gave a Hotel a Mediocre Review. Then Came the Badgering

#70

Post by joshspankit »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #41
nomilk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if we could make a browser extension that stores and presents amazon reviews. Could be useful to fill gaps on other sites too, for example when an uploader turns off comments on youtube. It would be a pretty big middle finger to amazon if the primary site for amazon seller reviews was not actually amazon, but a third party site/app.

Yeah I've been wanting to have that "comment on anything" for a while. It's possible in technical theory. But sharing the comments would be hard. Federation might work. Spam moderation could be hard. And most websites refuse to go into iframes, so your options are limited to browser extensions, SOCKS proxies, and Opera Mini style apps that re-render the page. Which means you'll get less than a percent of a percent of…

This has been floated out a couple of times, but there’s one more factor you’ve missed: The companies really want comments/reviews done by a platform they control and they will fight against 3rd party methods.
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