The personal sting of such finger-wagging is compounded by the potential financial one, since negative comments affect future bookings. I had been told by experienced Airbnb hosts to price my property low initially to get reservations, which would lead to reviews that would attract other guests. Then I could raise my rates. But they didn’t say what would happen if you got a big raspberry. Luckily, I already had more bookings lined up.

Everything will be your problem.

Even the things you can’t control. My worst sin in that first review turned out to be location, location, location. They claimed I was at least an hour from downtown (not 30 minutes as I said truthfully in my listing). Their low rating on my accuracy was, in the Airbnb webosphere, the equivalent of yelling, “Liar, liar.”

My listing included a map that showed exactly where I was in relation to Austin. When they arrived, the Oregon women told me their GPS took them the wrong way, and they did make the trip during rush hour; hence the 60-minute drive time. No matter. Their travel issues became my issue. I wanted to respond to their review with an apology for not clearing the highways out of Austin for them, but I had the sense to know snark would not win me future bookings. Instead I immediately put a disclaimer on my listing that “your driving time may vary because of traffic.” “Duh” implied.

A special kind of paranoia will set in.

Once you’ve gotten a less-than-rave review, you start looking at every possible defect as a potential online skewer. One day, when the wind blew one of the sheets off the clothesline and onto the ground (I had some romantic notion that people would appreciate the smell of country-air-dried bedding), I imagined the review I’d get if our next guests suffered a spider bite in bed. Another time I noticed the bathroom sink was leaking; in my head I saw, “Could not sleep because of the drip, drip, drip.” The emergency plumber bill was about half as much as my imminently arriving guests were paying for the whole stay. At that moment, the $650 a month from non-review-writing tenants seemed like a bargain.

You will not be above bribery.

When I bemoaned my bad review to a friend, she mentioned that she always gives wine to her guests. Aha, I thought. That’s what I was missing. So in addition to a basket of muffins, I began leaving a nice bottle of sauvignon blanc. “How much are you spending on each guest?” my husband asked when he saw me carting the check-in swag to the apartment. To be honest, I didn’t really care. My pride was at stake and anyway, it seems to have worked. All my reviews were glowing after the addition of alcohol.