Crashing in the living room

Obviously, it’s counterproductive to enter the debate loop about whether renting your home makes it a business. However, you are profiling when you assume that people who are opposite sex and don’t want to sleep together are homophobic. My husband used to have an assistant who along with her husband were so religious that they didn’t go beyond kissing before they were married. They are passionate advocates for LGBT rights to the extent that when she was on the hiring committee for a new principal she voted for a candidate whom she perceived to be gay.

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I’m a single lesbian and I haven’t had any problems, but I might if I was a couple. Until the recent election here in the US I felt confident we were moving in a better direction and I felt less anxiety than at any prior time in my life. Now I’m not at all sure and I’m disappointed that it appears that the bigots are feeling in confident in trying to go back to their old ways. I also have instant book so am taking all. I can be completely separate from the guests and I don’t even have to meet them if I don’t want. Still, it hurts to think that my room would shelter someone who thinks I’m going to hell, I don’t deserve equal rights, I shouldn’t be able to adopt kids, people should be able to fire me. I can’t do much about it except to keep doing what I do and hope for the best.

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Your point isn’t really clear to me.
And I think you are mixing up being prejudiced and profiling.

Profiling is one of the many guises of prejudice. Prejudice is pre-judging. Profiling is making assumptions about people’s behavior based on characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, etc.

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To me prejudice is based on little, and profiling is based on facts.
To me both derive from probabilism, knowledge acquired by experience and something inherent to our evolutions as human beings. It’s a mechanism that made our ancestors survive. Without a doubt this mechanism got tainted by the media in the last centuries, and one should speak up against this.

But someone taking the moral high ground and thinking that they are without prejudice and that they never ever do profiling, just makes me laugh my guts out :laughing: :sweat_smile: :joy:! We were al predestined to these things, there is no escaping… although there can be some self-moderation :wink:.

I hope and wish for a world with less prejudice, but I wish everyone the ability to profile correctly when finding themselves in situations where it will be useful.

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I find it problematic when evolution is brought into an argument to justify prehistoric behaviour. We have EVOLVED and most of us continue to do so! That means we don’t get to say ‘oh I can’t help my prejudices because we’re all apes really and that’s how it’s meant to be’. Um, no.

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@Magwitch I think you should read my post again, or maybe a few times.

I don’t have a lounge room anymore so that would be an especially strange request. When I did, I used to have homestay guests tell me they were leaving & then I’d get a replacement and the leaving one would often ask to crash on the couch for a few days as they hadn’t actually organised themself! I always said no and started doing ABB after 2 years of that.

I think one of reasons I get bookings when I’m on a nasty busy road and there are sooooo many ABBs around me is that I have a king bed and a double in the room. I often get groups of 2 or 3 friends share the room. I am surprised to hear people asking hosts to set the lounge room up for them. Especially as there are plenty of ABB with 2 beds and no doubt they will leave the couch smelly and sweaty and leave their junk all in there throughout the stay. That has certainly been my experience with relatives anyway. Basically excluding you from your own lounge room throughout the stay.

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We have two beds in our guest room. The two guests who asked if one could sleep in the living room preferred to sleep in separate rooms, not just separate beds.

@GutHend,

Exactly, good post.

I will add an example so maybe it’s clearer:

In my old flat the maximum number of people allowed was 3.
I had a request from 3 guests.
All of them were male.
They had no previous reviews.
They were very young.
They were doing “interrail”, which is an adventurous way of traveling here, often backpacking through Europe on the cheap.
I met them in person to exchange keys, 2 had rasta, and one asked me where he could buy some weed.

They were very good people and I actually liked them a lot, but don’t you think it’s fair to infer there are good chances they will not measure up to top 10% guests you had in the cleanliness department?
Being COMPLETELY bias-free and anti-profiling would mean to tell yourself “all these cues mean nothing: these guys have exactly the same chances of leaving my place clean as a well dressed, non smoker older single woman experienced travel and with some good reference”.

You know that’s silly.

The fact they indeed left the place very dirty means little, the main point here is this: profiling is indeed about probability. Sometimes you can go really wrong, but if your yardstick for profiling isn’t based only on prejudice, then it can actually help increase the chances you will get very good guests.

In this specific example my profiling was: young men, not a good sign. No previews review: no positive recommendation, not good. From my same country, Italy where often children do nothing at home because mamma cooks and cleans for boys till they are in their 30s, not good. Doing interrail, not good. 3 of them, not good. 2 had rasta and asked where to buy weed, not good.
Also you can see in action another tenet about profiling: stacking up cues tends to make it more accurate.

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We actually had someone do this without our consent. One male slept in the bedroom (the room rented) while the other slept on the couch in our main living area. We had to add a “RULE” about only sleeping in the room you rent. I’m sorry I provide a bed in a room you rent, this means sleeping outside that area is not an option.

It really upset me! Its one of those rules I never thought i’d have to make?? Most of my rules come from guests, ha!

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I do Airbnb from Stockholm, and have a very large comfortable bed. It is common here for friends of the same sex to share the bed, nothing inappropriate, but I always make sure they know this is not a twin bed situation.

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We have had both. Friends who share a bed [one built a wall of pillows between them which is odd, isn’t it?] and others who want me to make up the second bed. The second bed means that they loose their sitting couch in the second room. I don’t think the space is as comfortable when that bed is a bed and not a couch.

People who have no hang-ups about sharing space tend to be people I am more likely to click with (since I don’t). My first guests ever when i started hosting were two very heterosexual guys from Italy who not only had no problem sleeping in the same bed, they also had no problem walking around the house in their underwear. We were a house full of men, so nobody cared. Lol.

They were some of the most awesome guests I ever had, and i am still in touch with them two years later.

It’s fine if people have hang-ups about sharing space. Not everyone is the same. I get it. But, guests need to understand that extra accommodation requirements comes with extra cost. Wanna keep things cheap? Then make some sacrifices. You can’t have it both ways.

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Amen to that. Sadly I don’t think it’s common sense anymore.

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If you have a little room in your guest room for an air mattress, that’s a nice thing to keep handy. I’ve had a premium air mattress handy for situations like this or when groups end up being larger than my beds can accommodate.

Here’s the one I use:

If you charge for extra people, then this air mattress will pay off in just a couple nights (depending on what you charge).

I’d not hit the decline button just in case the person is willing to reconsider or sleep on the floor next to the bed. But rejecting them if they don’t compromise is valid considering how hard it would be to tip toe around the house in the morning knowing a person’s on the living room couch.

I completely get the person’s request, though. I worked for an airline and me and my coworkers had awesome flight benefits that enabled us to visit cities just for a weekend. I went on one such trip with a male coworker. I was comfortable sharing a hotel room with two beds or sleeping in the same space, but not the same bed. We worked together, and I didn’t want to send mixed messages about sharing a bed. I’ve shared a bed once in a similar situation (different guy) and had to turn down an advance from him while in said bed, and THEN it became awkward the whole night. Maybe it was presumptuous of him, but others may say I brought it on myself for being willing to jump under the same covers with him and spend an overnight a guy. So… everyone’s situation is different, and the request may have nothing to do with being conservative or liberal (spoken as a liberal myself).

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I did decline. When someone is annoying me even before booking I know it’s not going to be a pleasant hosting situation. And, then a much better set of guests booked instead, so lucky me. You have to trust your instincts when running this kind of business.

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I have the same attitude. I’ve had many guests share a bed, all kinds of combinations of gender, family, friends etc. They know the set-up and it’s none of my business whatsoever whether it’s “appropriate” or not. But if someone wants to book a space where the sleeping arrangements are clearly defined and then want you to change them because of their “special circumstances”, they can piss off, I’m afraid, and find somewhere else that suits them. I did have a set of guests once, two middle-aged women, who asked if I could provide some kind of bolster to put on the double bed to separate them. I came up with some solution but honestly, wtf? Did they imagine that one of them would roll over and suffocate them? Or that they’d catch some disease if their fully pjyama-ed bodies happened to touch? Or maybe one of them turns into a nymphomaniac as soon as they fall asleep? I aim to be accommodating where reasonable but that made my eyes roll. If they don’t want to share a bed, then book somewhere with two beds fgs!

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HA HA! Exactly right. I am happy to accommodate requests that are REASONABLE. You are so right…special circumstances mean they need to find special accommodations. It’s just that simple.

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