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Hi people, following on an interesting discussion in another topic I am going to try and make my first POLL .
Please, itâs only for live-in host without a separate entrance. So if your guests donât need to pass through your living room, hallway or any other room inside your home, to get to their room, youâre not being polled.
Ok, the question is:
Do you give guests keys to the front door? (Or any outside door, that allows access to your house and valuables.)
Always! Giving keys is the norm. No exceptions.
Mostly yes, but depends on how I feel about the guest.
@anon67190644 Judging by your explanation in the other topic, I would say that you fall in the âAlways!â category. Every guest has access to the lockbox and the keys within. No?
Your category is âAlwaysâ , doesnât matter if you hand over the key with your hands or through a box . I think you can still change your vote if you hide the results.
We also use a keyless entry system. My intention is to be here to greet every guest, especially since this is our home but sometimes it may not be possible, I also do not want to have to wait up for guests who have been out late or revise my plans for guests whose schedules donât match mine. We do not use instant book and read every guests profile. Their code is erased the day they leave.
That said - we have a locked room with no guest access to items we would not want curious or other eyes to see (file cabinets, etc.) and we lock our computer when we are out.
I voted for none of the above, my situation is different, because we donât lock our front door.
We live in a safe area of the country, in an even safer neighborhood, and our next door neighbor is a state trooper who usually has at least one, and sometimes two, marked police vehicles parked in the driveway.
If this were not the case, I would invest in a keyless entry system.
I give a key to the front door and a temp code to the house alarm system. The only problem Iâve ever had was someone breaking the key off in the front door.
So @GutHend I think this plays out with what I said on your thread that the vast majority of those who share their homes 9 out 10 on your straw poll let guests have a key.
Iâm interested has anyone queried on your listing about not having a key?
Do you think you have lost bookings because of it?
I know you said you havenât looked at electronic locks because you are looking at moving but you can take them with you.
Have you spoken to your landlord about installing one?
As heâs ok with you letting out your place (presumably) I would imagine he would be okay with this too they only take minutes to install. And you can replace the original when you leave.
This poll was not to decide what I will do. It was just to know what other people do.
But first of all, let us wait for a week and see if more people participate in this poll. For the moment the tendency is super clear. The result doesnât shock me, the extreme lopsidedness of the result does surprise me. This could be explained by the limited amount of participants.
I have travelled quite a bit in my life and have been in lots of places where I did not get a key to the front door. (No it wasnât because of me .)
For all the people interested in knowing why we donât give a key to guests, please read the other topic.
In those cases it wasnât AirBnB. I was referring to people who rent out 1 or 2 rooms, or very small family run hotels. In some I had to ring the bell day and night to get in. Others would have an open front door during the day, but I had to use the doorbell at night. It really didnât ever bother me.
But did you have a key to your room in those cases? Actually, I bet every room would have had a key? So if there was an intruder theyâd only be able to walk into the lobby area and not where everybody keeps their personal belongings.
When we host in our homes weâre not usually set up like that. If someone can come through the front door they can generally have access to anything in the house. Which is why most Airbnb hosts keep the door locked and hand out a key to guests
@Gardenhost Of course I had a key to my room.
I wasnât advocating having the front door open. I was just trying to explain that I have stayed in places where I had to ring the bell or knock on the door to to get in. This isnât often the case, but it does happen. At least in my experience. And certainly during nightly hours, I have been in lots of places where I had to knock the door / ring the bell.
To me it has never been something odd or something that inconvenienced me as a guest.
.
, doesnât matter if you hand over the key with your hands or through a box 
. I think you can still change your vote 
if you hide the results.
.)