Does "length of stay" correlate with quality of guest?

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Over the years I am often left wide-eyed at some of the tales of abusive/irresponsible/dishonest guests experienced by other members of this forum, and over and over again I am left wondering why we have managed to escape this kind of horror show.

The worst guests I’ve had (and my only two reviews with less than five-stars overall) included:

  • a two-month guest with a very young and immature new bride… after we left we found a frying pan with burnt on food hidden away at the back of the cupboard below the kitchen counter. (The pan was fixable by us after an overnight soak with Dawn)

  • Guests who actually sent a locally-based family member to inspect the suite well before the cancel-without-penalty deadline who gave us a three-star review because there was no dishwasher (when none was promised or depicted in the listing)

My grievance with these guests pale in comparison to the genuine horror stories I see on the screen in this forum. The explanation could simply be that we are lucky, but it’s been ten years, so there must be more than luck at work. I’ve got three guesses, and inviting comment from other forum members:

  • From the earliest days ten years ago our minimum stay was three days, and we bumped this up to one week when we reopened after our three-month COVID closure. I’m not sure how this would filter out troublemakers, but I’m left wondering if this is a factor.

In addition to length of stay, there are two other factors I wonder about when trying to figure out why we’ve never had a true horror show.

  • We are located well away from downtown or a tourist spot like a beach – people who come to this region to party will not be staying out here in the suburbs… miles and miles away from anywhere you could do a pub crawl or hang out on the beach. (There are vast beaches and world-class entertainment districts in the region, but almost an hour away).

  • When guests read our listing they are aware that their private, self-contained guest suite is in the same house as their retired hosts. They know that loud noise, extra guests, smoking etc will be noticed

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Like you, I have never had even close to a horror show guest. I have always had a 3 night minimum and a 2 week maximum, so don’t get really long term guests. But I have seen zero difference between 3 night guests and 2 week guests.

And I would be open to many of my past guests booking for longer than 2 weeks if they asked to do so.

I am in a really touristy beach town, but like you, am an onsite host. And I am a 20 minute walk to town, so I don’t get partiers. Some of the younger guests do go into town to bars at night, but they have been respectfully quiet if coming home late, aside from one guest, years ago. I also market toward the type of guests (those looking for a quiet tropical vacation, away from the hustle and bustle of downtown) that will be a good fit here.

I’ve had some solitary drinkers, judging from the number of alcoholic drink containers in their garbage, but they were never visibly drunk and didn’t leave more of a mess or damage anything.

As far as more mess or damages during long stays, I would think that it’s just a simple equation of averages. Someone who stays for 2 months and spends lots of time at home has more time to accidentally break or ruin something, or have grime build up if they aren’t particularly clean, than someone who only stayed 3 nights and was out and about busy with activities most of the time.

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I don’t count “accidentally breaking” something as a horror show as long as the guest deals with it like an adult

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Agreed. There are few of us who could claim we have never accidentally broken anything. But yeah, hiding it away in the back of a cupboard, as if it will never be found, or burying it in the bottom of a garbage can is quite childish.

I wonder how many of those types of people had parents who yelled at them when they accidentally broke something. My kids’ dad used to do that, with the result that they used to hide anything they broke from him.
Whereas I never got mad about what were obviously accidents, so the kids always came and told me if they broke something. One time my youngest, about 6 at the time, dropped and broke a plate she was carrying to the sink. She burst out crying, and when I said, “It’s okay, honey, it was just a plate, it was an accident”, she said “But it was your favorite one!”

When no one gets mad at kids for stuff like that, they can actually express real feelings, that are not self-centered, rather than have to be defensive.

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I’ve never had a bad guest in many, many years of being in this business.

I’ve had guests some hosts might consider poor or even bad. The host’s expectations matter just as much as guest expectations. A lot has to do with perception.

Something I do see often is that there are some hosts who complain about various aspects of a guest’s stay but in some cases, the host themselves could have made life easier for the guest.

For example, I left a rental only yesterday and there was no indication at all about that I should do with the garbage. So I bagged it up and put it in the ventilated bathroom (open window) where it wouldn’t stink.

Now some hosts would say that was the wrong thing to do. But the rental had no outside area, there were no dumpsters nearby, so what else could I do?

I hear hosts say that ‘bad guests’ left sand (or cheerios, or dog hair, or whatever) all over the floor. But was a dustpan and brush supplied? In many places I’ve been to, no.

To answer the original question, yes, I believe that length of stay is a factor. But I believe that a greater one is that increasingly, the stay is impersonal - there’s self-check in, the hosts and guests never meet, there’s no house tour etc. and it’s my belief that the personal touch inspires guests to be respectful.

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Once had a curtain-making job at a fancy rental which required curtain rods installed, which I handled by getting a welder to fabricate and install them. (Apartment construction was such that it required custom work, not ready-to-hang rods)

The welder had to drill holes in the wall for the supports, and after he left, I wanted to sweep or vacuum up the cement dust that resulted. I searched high and low for a broom amd dustpan, but couldn’t find any.

When I told the property manager that, he said that stuff is locked in the cleaner’s closet out in the apartment building hallway.

I asked him what would happen if guests dropped a glass on the hard tile floor at 1 in the morning. Are they just supposed to try to avoid stepping on broken glass until they could notify him, or are they supposed to call him in the middle of the night or try to pick up the shards by hand, possibly cutting themselves?
And as this rental was right on the beach, what if the guests would like to sweep up sand that accumulates, rather than walking around on a sandy floor?

He had no good answer to any of this, and obviously didn’t care.

I definitely agree that a personal meet and greet affects the level of respect. Of course some guests, even with a faceless host, will still leave the space clean and tidy, because they are mature, respectful people, but there are also the type who would just walk away leaving a mess for whom a host check-in might have influence.

Whenever I read hosts saying that most guests prefer self-check-in and no interaction with the host, I think “Yeah, so what? Most guests would probably also prefer to pay 50% less per night, leave the AC on all day on high while they aren’t even home, and be provided with endless amounts of towels and other amenities.”

As far as I’m concerned, guests who object to meeting their host, as long as the host isn’t invasive or overly chatty, are not guests I would want.
And hotels don’t have faceless check-in- guests have to check in with the front desk- why should they expect faceless hosts when renting a private home?

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Answer to question posted as title of post: Yes. Longer stays correlate with quality of guest stay. I can’t say that it correlates with quality of guest. I had one young man stay here several times with his fiancee/wife and sometimes their dog. But when he booked to stay for 6 weeks with his dog we had problems and he checked out 2 weeks early. So that experience leads me to think it’s the length of stay, not the person staying. But that’s just an anecdote, not data.

For second point I’ve said here dozens of times that I host travelers, not tourists. Lately I’m getting more locals who are neither. Tourists are entitled. They have disposable income, they don’t want responsibilities like cleaning lists, they are on vacation.

For the third point, yes, I live here and that avoids a lot of issues.

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Ugh, isn’t it a bit near-sighted if a host complains about a dirty place if he/she doesn’t even provide cleaning essentials???

We had construction workers staying for six weeks and they left the place cleaner than a doctor who stayed for two nights obviously having trouble to get the jam onto his toast instead a good amount was spread all over the coffee table. No plate or cutting board in sight (which we supply of course) - so he decided to freestyle it, leaving a nice mess on the table. Despite having a closet full of cleaning products, sponges, kitchen towels, microfiber cloths, broom, vacuum cleaner and mop he did not make use of any of that. :man_shrugging:

So, in our experience the length of stay has nothing to do with the quality of guests but there are so many factors coming into play that I think it’s impossible to make out a correlation of those two things.

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Once rented a place I was property managing to a young doctor, long term.
At one point I had to fix a dripping faucet there- he told me he was going to a conference in the city 5 hours away for 3 days, for me to just go in and do the repair.
He’d left the countertops covered in dirty dishes and rotting food, with cockroaches running over them.

When he moved out after a year in the place, it was dirtier than any previous renter had ever left it.

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