Airbnb Reinstating Retaliatory Reviews After Removing Them

[Colin Heffernan]

We had a guess try to extort us for a free stay at our Airbnb. They effectively said they would leave a bad review if we didn't fully refund their stay. When we didn't offer them money back and they left a bad review.

We have received confirmation from Airbnb support multiple times that the review violates their policy because it is clear retaliation, and gotten the review taken down, but the review keeps getting reinstated and we have to request it be taken down again. Each time, we have to start from scratch with the support agents, making them verbatim read our messages with the guest, previous conversations with Airbnb support staff, and then Airbnb's review policy.

What can cause a review to get reinstated like this? I finally got an agent to tell me that the guest has to be notified when their review gets removed. Does this mean the guest is immediately calling to get it reinstated when they get the notification, or is someone in Airbnb support throwing this over the fence to another department that does not know what they're doing and reversing the decision?

Based on how our conversations with support, any contact with them is completely starting from scratch with as limited context as possible. Support agents start by just looking at the review and do not look at any of our messages with the guest or previous support communications.

Has anyone else dealt with this? How do we hold Airbnb accountable here and end this cycle? Is there any escalation options we can pull?