My tastes for breakfast tend to be nothing that is considered morning food in the States. And I rarely eat before 11 am or noon.
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I basically only want coffee in the morning. Same, I donât really eat til noon.
My kids once woke me up at 8 am on Motherâs Day (not a gift), so excited and proud of themselves because they had made me breakfast, and stuck a plate of fried eggs in front of me as I sat up in bed half asleep.
Whatâs a mom to do?
âOh, how sweet of you girls, thank you. Um, itâs delicious,â as I am choking it down, trying to look appreciative.
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Yeah thatâs a possibility. We finally gave in and ate breakfast with her, she made a huge deal out of it and said that 10am was a good enough compromise and kept hassling us. I donât usually eat until 1 or 2, Iâve always been that way. No one in my family ate breakfast unless it was for dinner. It mostly felt like she wanted us to eat with her so she could talk, maybe just attention seeking. I donât know. She was definitely going through something. She was otherwise successful and I think we caught her at a bad time but after choking down a frittata and having a particular awkward discussion about why I donât like orange juice, I just wanted to get out of there.
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Iâd be really annoyed if someone expected me to sit down to breakfast at 10 am. (especially if I was expected to drink orange juice or eat a frittata 
. I could handle a croissant with coffee) As a night owl and late riser, 10am usually finds me pouring my second cup of coffee and organizing my day.
On vacation,I could easily sleep until 10am.
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Orange Juice would cause me a very bad day. Frittata, almost as bad. Yu are courageous. @JJD
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It kind of started with coffee. In her welcome message she asks about breakfast so I told her we would only want coffee but thank you so much. She said great and told us the night before that thereâd be coffee made in the morning. That first morning there, I was on the phone with work, there was an issue with a patientâs discharge plans so it was urgent.
I asked my husband to go get me a cup of coffee. So that I could function and deal with this work issue. He went to go get me a cup and came back without one and said, âshe says that you have to go in there and have breakfast if you want coffeeâ. That sounds crazy, right?
So I was sure that heâd misunderstood something. I sent him back in there and told him to please give my apologies but that Iâd really like a cup of coffee because Iâm dealing with work but that I was looking forward to meeting her as soon as I was done. He came back again without any coffee. He looked so defeated and said, âshe said noâ. Iâm literally on an emergency conference call with like 6 other professionals and I said WTF out loud. (It got a good laugh). So I continued to plough through, somehow without coffee.
I was now very confused and maybe a little hesitant to even leave the room. As a respectful guest, I decided that perhaps there was a rule against having coffee in the bedroom (it was a really nice bedroom) and that I was the one being rude. I looked at the reservation stuff for the house rules and there was nothing about beverages/coffee being in the bedroom. But still I decided that maybe it was just an unspoken expectation and that seemed fair, maybe someone stained the bedding with coffee or whatever. I tend towards empathy.
Iâm still on the phone, so I whispered to my confused and frustrated husband, âHey, I think maybe she doesnât want there to be coffee in the bedroom, Iâm sorryâ. He says, âthatâs not it, because, well actually she said that if you wanted some coffee that you should go get yourself some or that I could go get it for you and that thereâs a Starbucks 3 blocks downâ. 
I believe that this is when he let it out that heâd, in the middle of the coffee struggle that heâd somehow agreed to us having breakfast with her at 10. 
When I finally made it into the hostâs kitchen she said something snotty like, âOk. Hereâs some coffee for you, see?â. Bitch was lucky that Iâm not very aggressive because the coffee was very hot but in a tiny little cup that would have been so easy to gently toss in her general direction 
It was awful. I donât know if I can ever eat frittata again. We totally packed up and snuck out and got a hotel downtown. 
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Quite crazy. What a control freak. I can see why some people get turned off of home-shares 
I just show my guests where the French press and other coffee gear is kept, and grind beans for them the night before, so the grinder doesnât wake me up. Most of my guests are either sitting having their coffee or tea in the morning by the time I get up, or already up and out to the beach.
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Wow! That is absurd! I always carry a small container of instant coffee wherever I go. It solves any potential issues. That is the strangest Iâve ever heard.
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In our home share guest space we have a hot water pot, a drip coffee maker, several kinds of beans, a grinder and a coffee press. Also we have instant and decaf, sugar, sweetener, stevia, milk and non dairy milk. For the tea drinkers we have a variety of teas, caf and non caf. Hot chocolate too. If that doesnât cover it I donât know what will.
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I really love home stays! This is just a funny story, it didnât turn me off of home stays or anything. I had really forgotten about it. We werenât there very long, not even 24 hrs. I think she had something going on, a bad time of some sort. The listing was beautiful and she had been really nice, there was no indication that it was normal behavior for her. We just happened to be there at the same time she had whatever meltdown she was having that morning. It was too much for us so we left but she was obviously a really good host at other times. Who knows. At the time I suspected anything from a medication change to hormones to a personal tragedy of some sort. We felt kind of bad for bailing on her.
She did write me a note later and apologize and eluded to something going on with her. I didnât write a review, it all seemed to personal to her and not personal to us. But now that Iâm a host, put in the same situation, I think I would tell her that I wasnât going to write a review. I had no idea how important they were or the pressure they cause and she must have fretted for 2 weeks, long after I had forgotten about it. But it is really so funny now. Couldâve been a funny review.
Beautiful home and a gorgeous, comfortable room. The attached bathroom was so pretty, clean and had a bunch of nicer toiletries. Check-in was super easy and we loved the neighborhood. The host was kind of sadistic with the coffee so Iâd recommend that future guests bring some of their own with them.
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There was only one guest I didnât review, because I was quite uncertain as to how to review. While I was mulling it over, the review window expired. I didnât participate in any hosting forums then, otherwise I would have asked for input.
She arrived late afternoon, said she had friends in town, and went off for the evening. At 3am I was woken up by her and some guy drunkenly and loudly coming up the stairs, laughing, showering together, then the headboard banging against the wall.
I wasnât into getting up and making a scene at 3am, so I went back to sleep when they settled down and when I got up in the morning, they were already out. She had 3 more days left on the booking, so I texted her saying that wasnât cool, that they had woken me up, and that I only host one guest, which is what she booked for.
She right away texted back, apologizing, making some lame excuse about how it âjust happened, love and allâ and said sheâd like him to stay with her, sheâd pay more. I said that wasnât okay, but if she wanted to have him over during the day for awhile, and introduce him to me, that would be okay, but he couldnât sleep, shower, or cook here. She said okay.
She never did bring him around, we never spoke of it again, and we got along fine for the rest of her stay. She even asked if I knew of a nice day trip somewhere not too far, I recommended a cool site full of petroglyphs, she went and said she had a great day. The day she left, she said âYou know, I think you and I are a lot alikeâ. I really donât know what she meant by that, but I didnât ask.
She didnât leave a review, either. Maybe she was afraid to trigger me to leave a review mentioning her transgression.
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From the story, I would say that you both know what you want and speak up directly about it. Her with wanting him to stay and plainly saying so and you with not wanting him to stay and plainly saying so. And sometimes people say that because they want to be more like you, so either way itâs not a bad thing.
I canât imagine that guests who are not hosts would ever think of this. I donât think theyâre aware of it. If anything, I always thought I was doing the right thing, the nice thing by writing a host a review, almost doing a favor to write a review, so if I didnât love the stay I wouldnât write a review because, well I wasnât doing any favors for some host or listing that I was not excited about (not in a dramatic nasty way but more of a meh way, I got better things to do way).
I know itâs backwards now but I was a guest for a long time before I was a host and just didnât think about it the same way I do now (or know what I know now). I feel confident that guests donât think about reviews in the same way or a modicum as much as hosts do.
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The real value of superhost is that that algorithm gives you higher visibility in search results.
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Remember though that it is only one of the many factors that are taken into account when returning search results. So itâs hardly worth becoming over-anxious about.
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I love home shares. Iâve been a dedicated traveler all my life and have always gone out of my way to stay in homeshares. Many of the hosts Iâve stayed with have stayed with me, and we are all still in touch after all these many many years. The human factor is that extra special bit for me. As a homeshare host I pay it forward, with deliberate intention. I also love sharing what is special about my location, those things that a traveler would likely not stumble into, and that I know it will make a very special trip.
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She actually was sort of a host. I didnât mention that in my recounting above, as in âhosts make the worst guestsâ because when I looked at her listing, I saw that she only had one or two reviews, from a long time back. It appeared that she had just rented out her condo once or twice when she was travelling.
I doubt she knew about the âwait until hour 13.95â trick, but as far as reviewing in general, even a guest who wasnât a host might think âIf I donât leave a review, maybe they wonât either.â
But I more had the feeling she was one of those folks that just canât be bothered.
Wow. Talk about very annoying and entitled. I hope you blasted her in the review, as she well-deserved. She missed the âhospitality business memoâ.
Agreed, Iâm sure that we are in excellent company with winter being effectively or actually âclosedâ to tourism. One time my partner and I tried to drive and ferry to Alaska in April. That was a bust!
Unless you were headed to the Alaska Folk Festival, always held in April just before breakup, construction, tourism, and fishing seasons. We joke that we have 2 seasons here â Winter and Construction.
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We ended up spending some time on Vancouver Island, then took some time fooling around in BC. It was stunning, though not what we had planned.
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