Noel Vartuli lost his Superhost status on the spare room he rents out on Gower Street, Preston, not for a dirty bathroom or a cancelled booking, both of which he has successfully avoided in three years of hosting, but for what the platform's review summary described, politely, as a "hospitality mismatch." The guest who triggered it put it less politely.
"He walked me to the tram stop," the review read, in part, before going on to describe Vartuli's handwritten three-page welcome guide, his laminated map of "actually good" cafes within 400 metres, and a knock on the guest's door at 8am to check whether the shower pressure was "still agreeing with her," as excessive. The review gave five stars for cleanliness and location and one star for communication, a category Vartuli has never previously scored below five in, and had, until that week, considered his strongest.
"I thought communication meant communicating," Vartuli said. "I did not realise it could also mean not communicating. Nobody tells you that going in."
Superhost status is reassessed quarterly, based on a rolling twelve months of overall ratings, response times and cancellation history, with hosts needing an overall rating of at least 4.8 to qualify. Vartuli's listing, which he began three years ago to help cover the mortgage, has hosted 214 stays with an average rating he can recite from memory. He has personally driven two guests to the airport, fixed a guest's bike puncture unasked, and once intervened, he feels successfully, in a guest's breakup phone call by leaving a plate of biscuits outside the door "so she'd know someone was thinking of her." He maintains that none of this was unwelcome until, apparently, all of it was.
The quarterly review flagged phrases including "wouldn't leave me alone" and "meant well, I think" across three of Vartuli's last ten reviews, enough to tip his standing below the threshold despite an overall rating that remains, numerically, excellent.
Vartuli has responded by reducing his welcome guide to one page and removing the laminate, a change he describes as "deeply unnatural" and plans to reverse the moment he regains Superhost status, which he intends to win back the way he does everything else on Gower Street: thoroughly, and somewhat more than anyone asked for.