Should you trust that five-star rating on Airbnb?

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Economist, The Economist 4 min Read 14 Oct 2025, 12:27 PM IST Airbnb Logo and Rising Stock Graph is seen in this summary of this illustration (Reuters) how to make sense of online customer reviews, this is the summer in the Northern Hemisphere. And while holidaymakers travel to unknown places, that means the demand for online customer reviews. Do you want to find a restaurant that will not give everyone food poisoning or the perfect accommodation for a city break or a mosquito repellent that really works? Whether you look at TripAdvisor, Airbnb or Amazon, you will be almost certainly guided by reviews of other people. Should you be? The short answer is yes: better to have information than none. But the defects of online judgments are clear. For products with a few objective measures of quality, there is a great gap between the views of players and experts. A 2016 study by Bart de Lanhe van Vlerick Business School, in Belgium, and his co-authors found that user assessments for 1,272 items on Amazon.com were little related to consumer reports, a US product test organization or to their resale value. This may be because consumers place greater value on more subjective things like a product’s brand. But if ratings are based on subjective criteria, another problem arises: What if your taste differs from other people? The best book ever, according to members of Goodreads, an online community of bibliophiles, is “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins. You can agree, but many people don’t. Another problem is that the people who make the effort to leave reviews and ratings are not representative of consumers as a whole. In a study published in 2020, Verena Schoenmueller of Esade, a business school in Spain, and her co-authors, investigated the distribution of ratings left in about 280 million judgments of more than 2m products and services at 25 different platforms. They broadly confirm a well -known pattern: a polar distribution of ratings, with more of it at the extreme of the scale than in the middle, and a skewed to more positive ratings. There are many theories about why online judgments follow this pattern. People who have chosen to buy something are more likely to be satisfied with it. Extreme experiences, good and bad, are probably more reviews. Some writings are not real: estimates of the incidence of false reviews differ, but it is definitely a problem, and one that can aggravate generative AI. The type of platform is also important. Part economics markets have a different feeling. You can leave a four-star review for your Airbnb accommodation, but now that you have established a relationship with the hosts, and because they also judge you, it is much easier to award just five. In an article by Georgios Zervas of the University of Boston and his co-authors, which was last updated in 2020, it was found that the average ratings for Airbnb properties are constantly higher than those for hotels on TripAdvisor. In theory, businesses have an interest in the request of a sample as possible. After all, honest feedback from clients is the best way to detect and solve problems. In practice, the importance of good ratings, especially for firms struggling for visibility, is an incentive for jigging. For example, a study from 2013 by Dina Mayzlin of the University of Southern California and her co-authors suggested that small hotels owned independently produced more positive false reviews on TripAdvisor than hotel chains. If the incentives of businesses and consumers are not always in line, then platforms are the importance to ensure that reviews are as educational as possible. Weight scores according to the number of reviews a client writes can help reduce the problem of polarity; The research of Ms. Schoenmueller indicates that the more a person writes a person, the less their ratings are. But consumers can also help themselves. The research of Mr. De Lanhe suggests that people place too much weight on the total average rating. The absolute number of reviews is a better indication of real popularity. And it is the detail in an overview that tells you whether the person who writes it prefers the dystopian young adult fiction over other genres, or that a dining room is a buzz or the ability to hear themselves thinking. Reviews are even more useful when you read them. Subscribers to The Economist can subscribe to our opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, gas essays and reader correspondence. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Airbnb Read Next Story