This is really good conversation and thought. Great to hear all voices on stuff like this.
So, I just want to throw out some thoughts from experience in Servas, the old school hospitality group. Besides an actual interview to become a member, each country has ‘coordinators’ who manage aspects of the org in their region. I’m seeing references to ‘ambassadors’ here - does couchers have official ones? everywhere?
Seems to me that one sort of way to handle reviews is to have tech that allows for every interaction to do a review (scales and/or multiple choice) and those answers put to a dashboard that ambassadors could review - if negative trends start showing up for someone, either (or both!) the home ambassador or the ambassador of where the travel is happening could step in and do some ‘training’ of the traveler. If they aren’t open to suggestions, then the ambassador(s) decide whether to to cut them off.
There really shouldn’t be a way for me to ‘counter-attack’ someone publicly for writing a negative review. With a 3rd party involved, that ambassador would be able to discern who needs to change their behavior.
I suggest to have a checkbox to simply indicate if you recommend that guest/host to others (not checking it would simply keep their recommendation count unchanged), and two text fields:
Review: this is meant to be shown in the recipient’s profile, but it will be published only if they consent to do so. Otherwise will be kept hidden. Here I would expect good experiences to shine in beautiful grateful messages, and bad experiences to express their feelings in a constructive way.
Suggestions: this goes as a private message to the recipient’s inbox, and is useful to suggest improvements that can make the next guest/host experience more pleasant.
This would allow for a positive loop in the community, where good feedback gets exposed.
At the same time allows anyone to express their true experience, give suggestions for improvement, knowing that no public image will be affected by that, as each part can decide whether to make their received review public.
The hidden bad reviews would be still available to the moderators and authorities if an investigation is needed, for example in case a user is reported for an aggression.
A profile with a high “recommended” count will result more interesting to those searching for their next hosting experience, and the reviews will not have the noise of “false positives”.
Another thing that can be considered is for either party to remove the recommendation and review they gave at a later time, if they report that it was given under pressure of the host and for that they weren’t free to express the truth.
I wouldn’t go into star ratings or publicly reporting bad experiences. If something extreme happens that requires that person to be avoided by others, that profile should be reported.
If minor bad experiences happen, like the fact that the person wasn’t clean, than just don’t recommend them and give a suggestion for improvement. They may learn from that, and if they don’t, nobody will get hurt either.
Thanks for building this new community here. I hope to be more collaborative soon
