For those of you who have professions outside of Airbnb hosting, have you ever had to take time off work to manage your listing, do a turnover, etc.?
Sometimes when I have a teaching job on a tight turnover, I ask the guest if they’d mind checking in a little late and in return they’d get late checkout if available. That idea usually meets with a positive response.
I do take time. Thankfully I have a flexible schedule that allows me to do that. It’s not the best case scenario but since we are still new, I suspect I’ll get burned out soon enough and stop working on one while working at/on the other.
Yes I’ve had to do that,
I work from home when I like so no.
I worked for one year while doing airbnb and never took off but my one 3 star rating (for arrival) is because the guests had trouble getting in the house, I couldn’t answer their call because I was teaching and then when they got in the dogs behind a baby gate were barking at them. My mistake for letting them check in early.
Me too. And to me back-to-back hosting is more or less a full time job so I arrange other commitments around guests’ arrival and departure times.
I don’t but my husband does. He is either working at our farm, as a builder in town, or as a house husband so can take timeout to do a change over if needed.
My partner and I manage one whole-apartment property (not our own home). We both have full-time desk jobs with meetings, business trips etc. and it’s often a challenge. We try to meet all guests at check-in; most guests thankfully come after 6pm or on the weekend, so it’s doable. However, others arrive during the day. Same-day checkout-checkins and the resulting 4 hour cleaning window are also very difficult for us ourselves to handle, and so we try to avoid them during the week.
Lucky for us, we found a reliable person - a local grad student with a flexible schedule - whom we ask to do cleaning and check-in work when we’re not available, or when we are away on vacation. She’s been invaluable, but it does take money off from the bottom line.
My partner complains that this side-business is taking too much time out of weekends, especially with our recent move to a new location and associated moving/setup/furniture shopping etc. FINALLY getting the final delivery of curtains next week, and hope to get either our friend or a cleaning company do turnovers, so we can get some free time!
I am a college professor and always managing my listing while at work (reply to inquiries, asking guests when they’ll arrive, etc.). Like K9KarmaCasa guests have been unhappy they can’t get a hold of me while I’m teaching, and they didn’t read the self-check-in instructions. Profs can be really spoiled, though, compared to our colleagues teaching K-12… I only spend 8-12 hours a week in front of a classroom, and the rest of the job is meetings and prep and administration, so it is easy to step out and answer the phone. I teach at a commuter campus about an hour from where I live so I can’t zip home to turn the room over at lunch, but luckily they stack our classes so they’re all 2-3 days a week, so often I can work from home on the days where I have back-to-back guests. If the guests are arriving or leaving on one of my teaching days, though, I just have to block that day off on the calendar. I have goofed a few times and had to plead with a family member to help me get the room ready.
Luckily, my husband just transferred to a job site that is just two miles from our house (he’d previously been working in a suburb as well) and his shift is from noon to 8 pm. Today was the first day I put him in charge of the turn-over before he went into work, and he did a good job! I may have to impose an earlier checkout time, unfortunately, because he was late to work today since the guests didn’t leave until 11 am (the checkout time, but most leave sooner).
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