A Review Appeal Built on Five Grounds

A removal request is not a complaint about fairness. It has to name one accepted ground and attach the evidence that ground requires, in the order the reviewer reads it.

Last updated: November 2, 2026

A review lands at eleven at night, and it's wrong. The guest describes a broken shower that was fixed before they arrived, or a view of a car park that belongs to the building next door. Your first instinct is to write four paragraphs explaining why the week was fine. Don't. A removal request that argues fairness gets read once and closed. One that names a ground and attaches the file for it gets acted on.

Key Takeaways

• Fairness isn't a ground. The reviewer isn't deciding whether the review was kind. They're deciding whether it matches a rule the platform publishes.
• One ground per request. Five grounds in one message reads as a scattergun, and each one weakens the next.
• Evidence has to match the ground. A booking record proves nothing about a slur in the text, and a screenshot of a slur proves nothing about a stay that never happened.
• Quote the exact sentence. A paraphrase gives the reviewer nothing to look at and gives the other side room to disagree.
• A refusal isn't the end of the record. Keep it, reply to the review once, and fix the thing underneath if there is one.

What a removal request is not

It isn't a second review of your hosting. The first review already happened, and the platform isn't running an appeal on service quality, cleanliness or whether the guest was unreasonable. Nobody at the platform is going to read your side of the week and decide you deserved better.

It isn't a complaint about tone either. A review can be unfair, exaggerated, ungrateful and inaccurate about the small things, and still sit comfortably inside what the platform allows. Plenty of the reviews hosts want removed sit in that category, and requests tend to fail when the host argues about accuracy while the platform is asking about policy.

And it isn't a place to relitigate the money. If the dispute was about a damage charge, the review is a separate event, decided separately, by different people. Bringing the charge into the removal request muddles the one question the reviewer is equipped to answer.

What it is, in one line: an assertion that this specific review breaks a specific rule, plus the file that shows it. Everything that isn't that is noise, and noise is expensive here, because a reviewer with a queue reads the first paragraph and skims the rest.

The five grounds in plain words

Each platform publishes its own list of grounds and revises it from time to time, so the wording you should use is the wording on your platform's current policy page. What travels between platforms is the shape of the argument. Five shapes cover most of the requests that succeed.

One: the reviewer wasn't there. The guest never stayed, cancelled before arrival, or booked and never turned up. A review of a stay that didn't happen is describing something other than the stay, and that's usually enough on its own — provided you can show the cancellation or the non-arrival.

Two: it's the wrong listing. The text describes a different unit, a different building, or a different stay in the same city. This happens more than hosts expect, especially with co-hosts running several flats and guests reviewing from a shared trip. The giveaway is a detail that can't be true of your property: a lift in a walk-up, a balcony on a ground-floor studio.

Three: the content itself is prohibited. Personal data, a threat, discriminatory language, or a demand for money in exchange for a better score. This ground is about the words on the page, not about the stay, and it's the one ground where a screenshot of the text can carry the request almost alone.

Four: it's retaliation. You enforced a house rule, charged for damage, or reported something, and the review arrived afterwards and says so. Retaliation is hard to prove from one message and easier to prove from a sequence: the charge at 4pm, the review at 4.20pm, and a sentence in the review that connects them.

Five: it isn't about the stay at all. The review is about the platform's fees, the restaurant downstairs, the airport transfer, or a completely different trip. Relevance is a real ground and a dull one, which is why it gets skipped in favour of angrier arguments that don't work.

Read the five against the review in your hand, and be honest about which one fits. If none of them does, the review probably stays. That's a hard answer, and it's cheaper than three resubmissions and a fortnight of drafting.

Evidence that matches each ground

The most common mistake in this whole process is assembling everything you have and sending all of it. Reviewers work by matching, not by reading. Give them one claim and one file, and the match takes seconds.

For a stay that never happened, send the booking record showing the cancellation and its date. Not the messages, not the explanation, just the record with the date on it.

For the wrong listing, send the listing detail that contradicts the text, and quote the sentence that contradicts it. A photo of the front door without a lift, beside the sentence about the lift, is a complete argument. The rest of your portfolio isn't.

For prohibited content, quote the sentence, in the original words, with the date. Don't describe it. Don't add three examples when one exists. If the text contains personal data, quote only the part that shows it, and mask the rest — a request that republishes a guest's phone number to prove a point has made a new problem.

For retaliation, send the sequence with timestamps: the rule you enforced, the charge, the report, and the moment the review appeared. Then point at the sentence that ties them together. One line, one link in the chain.

For irrelevance, send the sentence and the evidence that it concerns something outside the stay. A booking for a different city, a fee set by the platform, a business that isn't yours.

One more piece of housekeeping, and it matters more than it sounds. The conversation you're quoting lives in the platform's own thread, and the stay record sits on the booking. localsbnb.com keeps Airbnb threads in one inbox and records a check-out only after you confirm it, which is how the timeline ends up with dates in the right order instead of a pile of screenshots with no sequence.

What to do when it fails

Refusals happen, and most are unremarkable. A reviewer reads a fairness argument, finds no ground, and closes it. That's the system working as designed, even when it's wrong about your week.

When a refusal comes back, read the reason before you react to it. If it names the ground it rejected, you've learned which shape doesn't fit, and you can decide whether a different one does. If it's a bare refusal with no reason, assume the first paragraph of your request didn't survive the skim, and rewrite it as one sentence plus one attachment.

Don't resend the same text. A resubmission with new wording and the same claim usually produces the same answer, and a stack of near-identical requests makes the account look like it's arguing rather than reporting. If you've got a genuinely different ground, say so plainly at the top: "this is a new ground, not a resubmission."

Then reply to the review itself, once. Not to win, and not to the guest. You're writing for the person deciding between your flat and the one next door, and what they respond to is calm and specific: what happened, what you did, and what's different now. Two or three sentences. No sarcasm, no list of the guest's failings.

Keep everything afterwards. The refusal, the request, the dates, the reply. It's not going to change this review, and it will take about a minute the next time a similar one arrives, which it will.

And if there's something real underneath, fix it. A review that says the water pressure is poor and a request that fails still leave you with poor water pressure, and that's the part you can actually control this month.

FAQ

Does a review have to be false to be removed?

No. Accuracy isn't the test. A review can be inaccurate and stay up, and a review that's mostly true can come down if it names a guest who never arrived. The test is whether it matches a published ground.

Should I list everything wrong with the review?

No. One ground, one file, one sentence at the top. A request that lists five problems invites the reviewer to pick the weakest and close the case on it.

What if the platform refuses and won't say why?

Reply to the review once, keep the refusal on file, and don't resend the same words. A bare refusal usually means the first paragraph didn't land, so rewrite the request as a single claim with its attachment before you try again.

Name one ground, attach one file, and stop writing. localsbnb.com is where the thread you're quoting and the stay record sit on the same booking, which is the order a reviewer reads in.

---

This article is general guidance for hosts and isn't legal, tax or insurance advice. Each platform sets and revises its own removal grounds and its own review policy, and no request is guaranteed to succeed. Confirm the current policy text of the platform you use before you submit.