Hi all. I’ve been hosting a tiny house about a year in a rural area near a large fresh water spring. In my listing, I talk about the spring but note its about 2 miles away. A couple of months ago another guy comes in, he’s about 8 miles from me. He has very flashy professionally effective photos of his tiny house, featuring an attractive woman lounging on the bed reading. There are two beds, a bunk, looks like a double over a queen, but he advertises for 5 people. There is no couch in the house but a couple of chairs. Maybe one makes into a bed ? It doesn’t say anywhere in the copy. He advertises for about 65 bucks ( how can he make any money at all? ) , mine is 85. But what I’m wondering about is that he intersperses pictures of our gorgeous freshwater spring among his house photos-as though you could see it from the listing. But the spring is about 7 miles away from him. Also, he shows beautiful pictures of a brook running merrily through the property. There is one, but it is about a foot across and flows only when it rains. I don’t want to be a jerk but is there such a thing as unfair competition?
He will soon get bad reviews from guests who are unhappy with the misrepresentation and that will be his ‘reward’…
I’d let it go for now.
This Host is creating expectations he cannot meet. So the marketplace should address this in time with reviews that say that the place does not look like the listing, or as nice. Or some might downgrade the listing for accuracy, location or overall and not even know why.
Although you could approach the Host to point out pictures taken of your brook on his listing, or report the listing to Airbnb, you don’t know how the Host will react and you’ll be on the path of negative energy, maybe worse.
I’d let to go; you might want to revisit the issue in a year or so. Meanwhile, focus on making your listing bloom.
Maybe treat a distant friend to a clandestine stay with him for a night and then encourage the friend to write scrupulously honest brutal review.
See if you can find out the name of his photographer and ping it over to me would you?
I wouldn’t make an issue of it. Leave it to the guests that book his property.
I always find those photos so weird. One guy in the southwestern US, with a bunch of listings, has an attractive woman in almost every photo in his galleries. Maybe it’s his wife, or maybe a model, but I find it strange.
There’s a listing in my area that has pictures of (I assume is his wife) but none of the shots show her face. I don’t think this would make a listing more attractive, if anything, it just makes it odd. Plus he has close up pictures of the spice rack, chair, bike, etc. The whole gallery seems odd to me.
Nice herb poster. I like photo galleries that show something out of the ordinary. I have several things in my veggie garden I tell the guests to help themselves to.
Don’t waste your time trying to do anything about it. If his guests object to his misleading ad it will catch up to him. If it doesn’t maybe time to put some stream and spring pictures in your listing too.
I’ve printed this poster and laminated it and it is glued up on the inside door of one of the above-counter kitchen cupboards. I get the sense that even guests who never avail themselves like the idea of staying in a place where they could if they wanted to.
Also – if we have guests with young children during raspberry season, we take the kids out and – after a short tutorial about “only pick the ripe ones” – let them U-pick enough for the family to have a big serving of raspberries & ice cream. Most of our guests are from large Asian cities and live in urban towers at home, and kids have never been to a farm – or a backyard raspberry patch, (Always gets a glowing mention in reviews when it happens)
There’s no need to be. As @Rolf says, the place will soon get crap reviews and be out of business in no time.
I have seen countless rubbish places near me advertise misleading stuff and of those, NOT ONE is still in business.
A place directly opposite one of our rentals had in the listing “a 15-minute stroll to the beach”, for example. It’s thirty minutes walking quite briskly.
A rental directly next door had ‘waterfront apartment with water views’. One of their guests pointed out to me that the only place you could see the water from was if you were sitting on the loo. And that although strictly speaking the building is waterfront, the apartment isn’t.
I have once reported a listing, in the building next to me, because they had copied my text word for word. This was to such an extent that they hadn’t even edited the word ‘apartment’ yet they were offering a private room.
Was anything done about that? Did they change it?
i reported it to Airbnb and I can’t remember whether they responded but the listing was removed shortly afterwards.
I had someone largely copy my listing wording when it was shared home. I wrote the offender directly, via Airbnb. He denied doing it, but changed the wording a bit more. I can’t recall if I reported to Airbnb but regardless, he didn’t last long. The only reason I even noticed was because back then I checked my competition regularly. There were only a handful of us in this part of town so it stuck out to me. I think I posted about it here at the time.
It would really irritate me if someone did that to me. I don’t hardly ever check out the competition, so for all I know, maybe someone has.
And how lame is that, that a host would copy and paste another host’s wording, instead of coming up with their own.
Now those folks could just use AI to write their description, no need to copy someone else’s.