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Hospitality

The Top Guest Complaints About Airbnbs, With Sources

By Jillian Mood6 min read

Top floor bathroom at the Southborough home, with elephant-print wallpaper and a white vanity

Guests have been telling this industry the same handful of things for years, and the record is public. Airbnb has rebuilt parts of its product around those complaints, regulators have written a rule about one of them, and researchers have sorted tens of thousands of reviews to rank the rest. Here is what guests actually complain about, with a date on every claim, and what we do about each one.

One note on method: I only kept a complaint if I could open the source and find the words myself.

1. "The price at checkout was nothing like the price I clicked on"

On November 7, 2022, Airbnb announced total price display and a checkout update: a price with all fees before taxes, shown "in search results, as well as on the map, filter, and listing page."

Guests wanted it. In a Harris Poll for NerdWallet (February 7 to 9, 2023, 2,080 US adults), 60% of travellers who had looked at vacation rentals preferred one total price to a base rate plus line items like cleaning fees. By April 21, 2025, Airbnb had made the total price standard for guests worldwide.

Then came the regulators. The US Federal Trade Commission's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect on May 12, 2025 and covers short-term lodging. The FTC's own FAQ names vacation rentals offered through platforms, and gives this example: "A vacation rental adds a cleaning fee that consumers must pay in addition to the nightly rate. The cleaning fee must be included in the total price." (I am a host, not a lawyer. Ask a professional about your own situation.)

The pillar that designs it out: Omotenashi. Anticipating a guest's needs includes the need to know what the trip costs. A Mood Method host promises no surprise charges, which means the number a guest sees first is the number they pay.

2. "I paid a cleaning fee and still got a chore list"

The same November 2022 announcement drew a line worth taping to the fridge: "Guests should not have to do unreasonable checkout tasks such as stripping the beds, doing the laundry, or vacuuming when leaving their Airbnb." Turning off lights, throwing food in the trash and locking the door were named as reasonable.

Airbnb followed through in its 2023 Summer Release on May 3, 2023. Guests can now read checkout instructions on the listing before they book, they can report excessive requests in their review, and "listings with repeated low ratings from unreasonable chores will be removed from Airbnb." Airbnb's Resource Center adds that folding those chores into your own cleaning routine "could lead to better reviews."

The pillar: Details and delight. The reset is our job. The checkout page of our Southborough house manual opens with "No complicated chore list, just a few small steps before you head home." Bag the trash, leave the towels, no need to strip the beds. More on tone and structure in the house manual guests actually read.

3. "It wasn't clean"

In a 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology, Kai Ding and colleagues analysed 59,766 Airbnb reviews from 27,980 listings in 12 cities, separating positive reviews from negative ones. Among 18 dissatisfaction topics, "dirtiness and smell" had the strongest power to predict an unhappy guest. The authors' summary: poor room conditions such as a dirty or smelly environment are "the main driver of Airbnb user dissatisfaction."

Airbnb tells hosts the same thing in plainer words: "Cleanliness is one of the top factors in guest reviews."

A caveat worth keeping: the study covers every listing type, shared rooms included, and reviews only capture guests who chose to write one.

The pillar: Details and delight. A scored reset after every stay, then a final walk through the house with a guest's eyes before anyone arrives. We vet every housekeeper, supervise closely, and check the results with audits and random surprise inspections, working from a checklist written for each home. My before-every-arrival checklist is yours to copy.

4. "It didn't look like the listing"

"Unmatched descriptions" is another of the 18 topics in the Ding study. Airbnb has described the problem in its own voice. Launching Guest Favorites on November 8, 2023, it wrote that "guests have told us that with so much variety, it can be hard to know what they're going to get," and called this "the #1 obstacle preventing them from booking on Airbnb."

The platform's response has been verification and removal. In its fall update of September 20, 2023, Airbnb said it would begin verifying every listing in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and France, and that it had blocked 157,000 fake listings that year and removed another 59,000. Its Global Quality Report of February 27, 2025 counts more than 400,000 listings removed for failing quality standards.

The pillar: Make it better, every stay. Houses drift. A chair breaks, a view grows in, an amenity retires. Kaizen applies to the listing as much as to the house: we re-check the photos and the description against the real rooms, and we fix whichever one is wrong.

5. "Nobody answered"

The Ding study cuts both ways on this one. "Communication" and "hosts' unpleasant behavior" both appear among the dissatisfaction topics, and on the positive side the authors found that "maintaining positive communication has the strongest predictive power to Airbnb user satisfaction." Guests notice its absence, and they reward its presence more than anything else a host does.

A 2023 YouGov survey of 2,024 US vacation rental guests, commissioned by Touch Stay, points the same way: 69% said communications most influenced their likelihood of leaving a positive review. (Vendor research, so hold it loosely.)

The pillar: On-the-hour answers. A real person, within the hour, glad to hear from you. The system behind that is in the one-hour rule.

6. "We couldn't get in, and then the heat didn't work"

Read more topic names from the Ding study in a row and you can hear the reviews: "door lock/key," "checking in/out," "room temperature," "poor room maintenance," "bathroom problems." Airbnb's quality report lists ease of check-in beside cleanliness and accuracy as factors that make up the quality of a stay.

The pillars: Omotenashi, plus Details and delight. An arrival that works on the first try, with a backup. And maintenance on a schedule, so the guest is never the one who discovers the problem.

What the list adds up to

Look at what is missing. No one in these sources is asking for a bigger house. Guests want the truth about the price and the place, a clean home where things work, an answer when they write, and a goodbye without homework. That is a list about trust, and trust is something any host can build on purpose.

It is also, line for line, the Mood Promise. The Mood Method is simply the set of habits that keeps it, stay after stay. If you are aiming for a badge, the same habits are the groundwork for Airbnb's Guest Favorite.

Sources

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