How we decide

A report is built from every public review a listing has, judged one at a time, and the verdict comes from counting what those judgments say. A report is our reading of what guests wrote, and every claim on it comes with how many guests said it. This is the whole process, in plain words.

What we read

Every review the listing has, not a sample, five-star reviews included. Some five-star reviews still describe a problem, and an average rating smooths those over; the live share is on What we found. We also read the listing's own text and its amenities list. On the very largest listings we read the most recent 2,000 reviews, and the report says so in its title and its read note. Every report says which day it was built.

What counts as a problem

Each review is judged on its own: does it report a problem, what kind (noise, cleanliness, access, accuracy, safety, cost, host, location, maintenance), how serious it was, and whether the guest was being polite about something worse. That last one is its own yes-or-no question on every review: does the wording soften a problem the review still describes, "a bit of street noise" from a guest who also says they couldn't sleep. A guest who says the stay was fine and then describes a lock that didn't work has reported a problem. A guest who mentions that the wifi dropped once and says it didn't matter has not, and neither has a guest who says the place was small but they knew that going in. The line sits at a real annoyance, something the guest had to work around, and every count on the site uses that same line. Each review is counted once, under its main problem.

How the verdict is decided

By the same rules for every listing, applied to the counts. A listing is a Skip when the same problem keeps coming up among recent guests, or when a serious problem shows up in five-star reviews as well as low ones, which means even the happy guests hit it. Everything short of that is a Book, with the problems that didn't reach the bar still on the report under "go in knowing" and how many guests said so. Recent reviews count for more than old ones, and a Skip needs a recent problem. Something guests stopped reporting a long while ago stays on the report with its date, but it can't decide the verdict, because hosts fix things. One complaint from years ago never decides anything on its own, and a verdict never flips on a single new review. When it does move, the report says so, with the date and what it was before. The verdict is our reading of the reviews, not an inspection of the property, and the judgments behind the counts come from software reading reviews, which can misread one.

When there are too few reviews to call

A listing with ten reviews or fewer gets the whole report and no verdict. Half of Airbnb is that small, and six reviews can't show a pattern, so we don't pretend they do: the band says "Too new to call", and under it is what those guests wrote, counted the same way as any report, plus the listing's own text read closely. With no reviews at all, the report reads the listing text, the amenities and the house rules, and says so on every line. These reports are free, spend no check, and are open to anyone. Once the listing crosses ten reviews, the next check gives it a verdict, and Watch tells you when that happens.

Where the words come from

The sentences on a report are written by a language model from the judgments and the counts, the way a person would write up a tally. It isn't allowed to change the verdict, and the counts beside every issue come from code, not from the model, so you can check the words against the numbers yourself. A phrase shown as the listing's own words has to appear in the listing text or in at least two reviews, or it is dropped. The model can still misread a review or word something badly, which is what the mistake link at the bottom of every report is for. Every negative sentence says who reported it, guests, and how many. Nothing on a report is stated about the property or the host on our own say-so.

What we keep

For each review we keep its judgment, its star rating and its date. We don't keep the review text, and we never store reviewer names, photos or profile links. A report quotes a few words at most. The rest is in our privacy page.

Who pays us

Travelers, through trip packs. Hosts can't pay us and we take no booking commissions, so nothing on a report is for sale. The numbers are on /stats.

When we get it wrong

Reports are written by software and can be wrong. Every report has a "Something wrong in this report?" link near the bottom that reaches a person, and we fix what's wrong.

When a host disputes a report

A host can write to us from the same link. When one does, we reread the reviews they point at and answer within 48 hours. We may take the report down while we do that, and it comes back corrected if we got something wrong, or with a note saying nothing changed. Hosts can't pay us, and nothing a host pays or says changes a verdict on its own. What a host shows us can change what we read: a review we misjudged, a listing we matched to the wrong page, a problem the reviews themselves say was fixed. We correct the reading, and the verdict follows the corrected reviews, whichever way that goes.