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I have just started up a second listing, a large vacation condo. My last guests just checked out, and they left the place an absolute mess - unidentified spills on the carpet, dishes washed poorly by hand that needed to be re-washed, sticky counters, furniture moved around, cigarette butts on the balcony, and so on. I hire professional cleaners who charge by the hour, and am going to be out of pocket for the extra cost to put everything back again. My house rules don’t specifically mention extra cleaning charges, but they do say that guests should be respectful and notify me immediately of any spills. I also have a detailed check-out list which includes doing the dishes, wiping down counters and leaving things generally as they found them.
Do I have any grounds for putting through a request to ask them to pay the extra cleaning cost? I have photos and will have a receipt from the cleaners. My next guests check in tomorrow afternoon so I have a small window of time.
The only thing I can imagine that Airbnb would support you in is the spills on the carpet assuming that you need the services of a professional carpet cleaner. The rest sound like guests who are slobs, but there was no damage done.
Yeh… I don’t think you’ve got much of a leg to stand on. Moving furniture, leaving messes is part of doing business. Maybe you should re-think those by-the-hour cleaners as too expensive.
Yeah, this place is all broadloom. I knew it would be a problem eventually!
Oh, and guess what? These guests were young Chinese kids living in Canada. I was worried they’d be a problem, but let them book anyway because I didn’t want to stereotype. Apparently my concerns were well founded…
The guests I’ve had who caused extra cleaning on my part came from a variety of countries, U.S., Germany, China. I’ve also had very clean guests from each of those countries. I haven’t found a correlation between the country a guest is from and how clean they are.
Do you know what confirmation bias is? If you had booked Chinese Candianian guests and they had left your place pristine would you have come here to post about it? If it had been white Canadian guests (but not Quebecois) would their ethnicity or nationality be mentioned by way of explanation?
I’m not trying to be rude, I’m skipping the sarcasm, I’m just wondering.
Of course @cooperjto it was absolutely because they were Chinese - young white kids would never have been this disrespectful of your property and caused such a mess would they?. Now you can confirm your own prejudices and stereotype away
I do, and I am very careful to avoid stereotyping people based on their age, sex, ethnic background, etc. I only mentioned it because of the other thread that got locked and I’ve had a string of bad experiences with young Chinese/Chinese Canadian guests. This was my first Chinese group at the new place, and the first bad experience too. .
If I had a bunch of young American or Quebecois guests who left my place in a mess I’d certainly come here and gripe about it, but in my experience 99% of them are very respectful. They understand that it is my personal property, and appreciate that I trust them not to mess it up. They also care about their damage deposit and getting a positive review at the end of it. Even if they’re just there for one night to party they still have the common decency to put everything back in order after the raging bender…
For some frame of reference, my mother teaches adult ESL in a part of Toronto that is heavily populated by Chinese immigrants of all socioeconomic backgrounds. Apparently the rich young kids are notorious for being spoiled by their parents, and as a result having no clue how to behave properly. It’s not that they’re malicious, they just don’t understand that their behaviour is a problem, because they’ve gone through life having never faced the consequences of their actions. As such it’s no surprise that they don’t read the check in instructions, house rules or tidy up after themselves. Their parents didn’t make them follow any rules, so why should they listen to some stranger?
These guests really had no clue… after checking out they sent me a lovely message saying how great the apartment was. Never once mentioned the stains on the carpet or the fact that they left the place a giant mess.
I guess my question is…would you attribute the behavior to their nationality? Would you say “this is the third bad set of white guests I’ve had that…” Do the non-white guests get labeled as non-white while the whites get other labels: young/old, rich/poor, drug user, prostitute, obese, smoker, entitled, selfish, etc?
I think you and most of the hosts here try hard to avoid stereotyping. Many of us have instant book which guarantees we are taking in anyone. I have my biases, as we all do. I ask not to give you a hard time but to try to understand our human tendencies and how it affects this business.
It’s a complicated combination of nationality, culture, and income level. Basically it is just wealthy “FOB” (fresh off the boat, excuse the phrase but that’s what everyone says here) Chinese youth who are consistently a problem.
Hosting a relatively expensive whole apartment rental in downtown Toronto, I probably get a very different mix of guests than most. For one thing, there’s isn’t the same white/non-white dichotomy that you might find in most places in the US - I regularly host non-white guests who were obviously born in Canada/US/UK/Europe and are clearly fluent in English. I also get a fair contingent of what you would call “white” people and a smattering of white and non-white non-native english speakers from all over the place. Does a German person count as white? I would say they’re culturally more different, and more of a risk to me than the brown (aka south asian) person who grew up in a Toronto suburb!
Almost all of my guests are very pleasant and respectful. Once awhile you get someone who doesn’t really understand that Airbnb isn’t like renting a hotel, but it’s a rare exception. Very few of my guests act entitled or selfish, because normally they’re splurging on a nice place, and tend to treat me like I’m doing them a favor by letting them stay at my place. Most people who use Airbnb are fundamentally nice, at least in my experience. Sometimes people knock me down a point for value or cleanliness, but that’s only because they had very high expectations due to the price paid.
I rarely meet my guests in person due to self check in/check out, so all I have is a profile photo, their written communication skills, how easy check in/check out goes, and the condition they leave the apartment in. If one of my guests was an obese, drug using prostitute I’d never know… as long as they were pleasant and tidy I’d be happy!
There’s nothing racist about that term, it is typically used by Canadian-born visible minorities to refer to recent immigrants within the same ethnic group. Try watching some Russell Peters stand up comedy to get a sense of what it’s like to live in the most diverse city on earth! We don’t pretend that everyone is the same here, but we do celebrate our differences.
It’s one of those terms that is different when Asians use it about other Asians. Like they way “gay” and “bitch” can be used as an insult or as a factual term. And how I can use it about my friends in a way I’d find offensive if you used it about my friends.
And even if it’s not racist, it’s not a compliment.
I assume that your friends were using the term to denigrate people who hadn’t assimilated to the culture in the U.S. as much as they had which I believe is insulting.
Asia is a continent with a lot of countries many of whom historically are biased against one another. One of my Chinese guests was upset to see the fans we had been given by Japanese guests displayed. We had a Korean guest who despised Japanese people.
Israel and Palestine are both in Asia and nobody would argue that the citizens of those countries aren’t good at being bigoted against each other.
Back on topic, the update to the situation is that the guests completely ignored my request for money. After escalating the request to Airbnb they asked for an invoice for the professional cleaner. The actual estimate for a spot clean came in at $50, but if we just do a small area it won’t match the colouring of the rest of the carpet. I’m sure Airbnb would never cover the $250 to do the entire level of the house, so basically I’m just going to eat the cost of having my cleaners do their best to get the stain out by hand, and the guest gets away scot-free.
I think Airbnb should at least side with the host in cases where the guest ignores the request. It’s pretty ridiculous that someone can just ignore me and get away with it! What is the point of a damage deposit again?
Oh my god, I just had another group of young Chinese kids who trashed my place. Is this some sort of bad karma coming back to me? They put liquid hand soap in the dishwasher!
