A One-Star Review Cost This Dunedin Host Five Months of Bookings

What happened

Over Anzac weekend this year, a Dunedin bed and breakfast owner smelled cannabis coming through the extractor fan that connects her guest studio to her family home. She knocked on the door, told the guests to stop, and said she would call the police. They left within half an hour, a day early. Police attended. No arrest was made, no charges laid, no formal warning issued.

Two days later an anonymous one-star rating appeared on her Booking.com listing.

The rating carried no written comment. That detail matters more than it sounds, and we will come back to it.

Her listing otherwise held 18 top-band ratings and 13 in the band below. This single rating dragged her average down, and her bookings went with it. She had been taking around ten a month. Over the five months that followed, she took ten in total.

Five months, fifteen phone calls, one journalist

She asked Booking.com to remove it. What followed, as documented by Stuff, was eight calls out, seven calls in from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Singapore, calls running from eleven to ninety minutes, three disconnections, and three promised callbacks that never came. Each time she re-explained the situation from the beginning.

She was told she needed evidence, so she requested the police report. Obtaining it required an Official Information Act request with a twenty working day statutory timeframe. Before it arrived, Booking.com declined the removal. When she sent the report in July, the platform declined again, saying the content was relevant to the travel experience.

Then Stuff put questions to Booking.com. Within a day, the rating was removed. In the four days after removal she took five bookings, more than she had managed in months.

Booking.com told Stuff its review system is designed to reflect genuine travel experiences, and that the review was removed after following its process. That is a reasonable position, and the outcome was the right one.

The host's own question is the one that lingers: why did it take a journalist?

The mechanic that did the damage

Strip away the cannabis and the police and the phone calls, and a single structural detail caused most of the harm.

The rating had no comment attached. On Booking.com a host can publicly reply to a review, but there was nothing to reply to. A number appeared on her listing, it moved her average, and she had no way to put her side in front of the next person looking at it.

A one-star review with a paragraph of complaint is survivable. Future guests read the complaint, read the host's reply, and form a judgement. A bare number offers nothing to read and nothing to answer.

Where we sit on platforms

We should be fair here. Booking.com is a genuinely useful channel. Its reach is enormous, it brings international guests that other platforms do not, and for many properties it fills dates that would otherwise sit empty. The host in this story stayed on it for exactly that reason: most of her guests come from there. We list properties on it for our Gold and Platinum owners, and we would again.

But we start with Airbnb and Vrbo, and this story is close to why.

Those platforms verify guests through their own identity processes. Guests carry review histories of their own, written by previous hosts, so someone who has caused problems before arrives with that visible. And we can decline a booking. A booking request is a request, not an instruction.

That combination changes the shape of the risk. It does not remove it, and we want to be honest about that. Verified guests still behave badly, review histories are thin for anyone new, and a retaliatory review can land on any platform. What changes is how much you know before someone walks in, and how much say you have at the point where saying no is still possible.

Our own version of this

We have had a stay go wrong. A guest did not look after the property and made noise into the early hours, enough that neighbours were worried and complaints came back to us.

What told us something was off was mundane. Our outdoor security cameras had stopped reporting. That gap was the first signal that something needed attention, before any complaint reached us.

We acted the same day: dealt with the guest, and went to the neighbours ourselves rather than waiting for it to escalate. The relationships held, which matters more than the single booking did. A neighbour who trusts that someone answers the phone is worth considerably more than one night's revenue.

We mention it because we are not writing this from a position of never having had a problem. We have. The difference an incident makes is almost entirely about how fast it is noticed and how quickly someone deals with it.

What owners should take from this

• Report misconduct while it is happening. This host did, and it still took months. Without that record it would have taken longer, or not happened at all.
• Keep your own documentation. Her call log, timeline and police report were what made the case reviewable when someone finally reviewed it.
• Do not rely on a single channel. Her bookings were concentrated on one platform, so one rating on that platform hit everything at once.
• Understand the removal process before you need it. Every platform has one. They differ, and the difference only becomes visible at the worst possible moment.
• Know that acting correctly does not protect you. She confronted the guests, called the police, and reported it to the platform. The review appeared anyway.

Why this is part of what we do

Most of managing a property is unremarkable. Pricing, cleaning, messaging, restocking — the ordinary arithmetic of what a property earns. Then occasionally something like this happens, and the work becomes documentation, phone calls, and keeping a rating from doing five months of damage.

An owner managing their own property does that alone, usually while working a job. We do it as the job, and we have the platform relationships and the paper trail habits that make it go faster.

We cannot promise a review will never land unfairly. Nobody can. What we can say is that you will not be the one making the fifteenth phone call.

Source

Natalie Akoorie, “BnB owner's nightmare after evicted guests' 1-star review tanks bookings”, Stuff, 30 September 2026. The rating was removed on 25 September 2026 after Stuff put questions to Booking.com. The host's surname was withheld at her request.

Platform policies described here are Airbnb's and Vrbo's guest verification and two-way review systems, and Booking.com's review content guidelines, as they stood at the time of writing. Platform policies change; confirm the current position before relying on any of it.