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Tarundeep Singh
My name is Tarundeep Singh and I’ve spent the last 3.5 years here at Booking.com. Prior to joining the company, I worked for almost 9 years in India as a Product Manager for multiple e-commerce companies including India’s largest OTA.
I started at Booking.com as a Product Manager for the Partner Content team, where I had the opportunity to connect directly with partners like you. Today, my focus is on our User Generated Product (Reviews and Ratings) as a Senior Product Manager.
Hey Isle of Wight Vacations - I am really sorry that you feel this way, maybe we can setup a call between us for me to better understand the scenario and help you.
Hey Rodger - Let me expand on this statement a bit, what I meant here is:
Currently guests can leave a bad rating without any reason, we are working on a product (In development, experiment to launch soon) to collect reason for that bad rating.
This is to ensure that we know why the guest is leaving a bad rating.
Thank you everyone for the questions, I have tried to answer majority of the questions that were in scope for this session:
Question: What is booking.com doing to protect hosts from malicious, unfair or in some cases; illegal & defamatory reviews?
Answer: We at Booking have a moderation team which has a primary focus to ensure that there are no malicious or unfair reviews being published on our platforms.
Partners like you are important for us and we have given you the option to flag the review which they believe is malicious or illegal. Then our moderation team works on it to ensure that only the correct representation of the stay experience is being published on our platform.
Question:How does booking.com ensure that it is compliant with defamatory law in the host countries?
Answer: We at Booking have a strong legal team which works closely with us to ensure that we are compliant to all the laws in a specific country.
It is not about defamatory laws we comply with but all compliance requirements for a specific host country.
Question: Why is it not possible to speak directly with a member of the review team?
Answer: We have a process setup where we get the feedback either directly from partners through Extranet or we get collective feedback from your account managers about the problems being faced by partners.
I can assure you that I personally go through all the feedback we receive about our reviews product but sometimes it takes us time to fix some of them as we have limited capacity and need to prioritize accordingly but rest assured that we always aim to fix all partner problems as soon as possible.
Question: What is being done to make the review system more fair for hosts?
Answer: We at Booking and review team have a guiding principle to make sure that the reviews are just and fair.
We don't and will not make it biased towards either hosts or guests, we want to ensure that the guests are able to share their authentic stay experience and partners/hosts are able to get actionable insights from their guests on how to improve their review score.
We have a few product launches in the pipeline in the coming months to start collecting more relevant reviews from customers, the communication regarding the launch will be done and shared with you all once the features go live.
Question: Can we expect to see a review system for properties to rate guests?
Answer: Thanks for sharing the feedback, this is a topic we are researching on but currently it is not in our roadmap.
If we get good signals from our research about the need for this product, we will definitely prioritize it accordingly.
Question: Why can't hosts respond to reviews with no comments?
Answer: Thanks for sharing this feedback, let me go back to the drawing board to see if and how we can implement this.
Question: What is the process for escalating a review when you feel that the request for removal has not been considered/done correctly?
Answer: Our moderation teams have SLAs and there are very few incidents where we might breach the SLA because sometimes it takes time to verify the truth from both sides and act accordingly.
I can assure you that we take this SLA very seriously and want to ensure that only authentic and true reviews are displayed on our platforms.
Question: What has been the general host consensus/feedback on the switch from an automatically generated overall score to a user-picked overall score and has this been a move in the right direction?
Answer: We never had an auto generated overall review score, it always has been selected by the guests.
For the fairness of the review system, Booking can not generate any review score, it has to always come from the real guests.
Thanks again for all the questions, we will continue working to make sure all your queries/problems are resolved.
Hey Isle of Wight Vacations - I am really sorry that you feel this way, maybe we can setup a call between us for me to better understand the scenario and help you.
Hey Rodger - Let me expand on this statement a bit, what I meant here is: Currently guests can leave a bad rating without any reason, we are working on a product (In development, experiment to launch soon) to collect reason for that bad rating.
This is to ensure that we know why the guest is leaving a bad rating.
Thank you everyone for the questions, I have tried to answer majority of the questions that were in scope for this session:
Question: What is booking.com doing to protect hosts from malicious, unfair or in some cases; illegal & defamatory reviews?
Answer: We at Booking have a moderation team which has a primary focus to ensure that there are no malicious or unfair reviews being published on our platforms. Partners like you are important for us and we have given you the option to flag the review which they believe is malicious or illegal. Then our moderation team works on it to ensure that only the correct representation of the stay experience is being published on our platform.
Question:How does booking.com ensure that it is compliant with defamatory law in the host countries?
Answer: We at Booking have a strong legal team which works closely with us to ensure that we are compliant to all the laws in a specific country. It is not about defamatory laws we comply with but all compliance requirements for a specific host country.
Question: Why is it not possible to speak directly with a member of the review team?
Answer: We have a process setup where we get the feedback either directly from partners through Extranet or we get collective feedback from your account managers about the problems being faced by partners. I can assure you that I personally go through all the feedback we receive about our reviews product but sometimes it takes us time to fix some of them as we have limited capacity and need to prioritize accordingly but rest assured that we always aim to fix all partner problems as soon as possible.
Question: What is being done to make the review system more fair for hosts?
Answer: We at Booking and review team have a guiding principle to make sure that the reviews are just and fair. We don't and will not make it biased towards either hosts or guests, we want to ensure that the guests are able to share their authentic stay experience and partners/hosts are able to get actionable insights from their guests on how to improve their review score. We have a few product launches in the pipeline in the coming months to start collecting more relevant reviews from customers, the communication regarding the launch will be done and shared with you all once the features go live.
Question: Can we expect to see a review system for properties to rate guests?
Answer: Thanks for sharing the feedback, this is a topic we are researching on but currently it is not in our roadmap. If we get good signals from our research about the need for this product, we will definitely prioritize it accordingly.
Question: Why can't hosts respond to reviews with no comments?
Answer: Thanks for sharing this feedback, let me go back to the drawing board to see if and how we can implement this.
Question: What is the process for escalating a review when you feel that the request for removal has not been considered/done correctly?
Answer: Our moderation teams have SLAs and there are very few incidents where we might breach the SLA because sometimes it takes time to verify the truth from both sides and act accordingly. I can assure you that we take this SLA very seriously and want to ensure that only authentic and true reviews are displayed on our platforms.
Question: What has been the general host consensus/feedback on the switch from an automatically generated overall score to a user-picked overall score and has this been a move in the right direction?
Answer: We never had an auto generated overall review score, it always has been selected by the guests. For the fairness of the review system, Booking can not generate any review score, it has to always come from the real guests.
Thanks again for all the questions, we will continue working to make sure all your queries/problems are resolved.
Cheers!