My cleaner said the robe was nowhere to be found. But an owner/host with more experience than I told me to write a very polite SMS asking if the tenant knew where the robe was (besides the one he left hanging on the bathroom hook). He replied that to keep it from being soiled by his children he’d put it in a storage cabinet. One that is never used. This is why these forums are so important.
Chelsea, this is a very very bad guest. I would not have been so understanding. I ink you’d be protected from libel on an Air review situation. You should consider leaving a truthful review about this guest at the last minute on the last day before midnight in the guest time zone.
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So you did find the robe in a storage cabinet? Or are you speaking of the other owner’s experience?
Snowflake, this is unacceptable. Are you sure your rules about check out are crystal clear? Lingering past check out is a bad thing for a guest to do and should be reported in the review. As should the bloody towel. Wine or no wine.
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I got the advice from someone more experienced than I, and have not yet been able to check as we have another tenant. I did send the SMS and got a reply quickly. I will ask the new tenants to check tomorrow, but I do believe the former tenant. As for the cleaner, this was an unusual case (for us) of a tenant leaving at 11:00 and another tenant arriving at 2:30 (with the understanding they could leave their luggage but the linen was still being laundered).
The rental property is a 1-bedroom apartment (sleeps 4, including a sofa bed in the living room) that we used to rent by the year but chose to rent short-term, giving us the option to sell. Perhaps it’s a matter of the season but we haven’t had as good a rental response as we expected, despite a competitive price and good location.
As it happens, Ikea has a sale on the robes for members of its loyalty card scheme, £19.50. Maybe I should buy some extras…
Wow, I would cut back on doing the guests favors such as that late check out and early check in… they will take advantage and not reciprocate with a good review for you! It adds stress to your day and why should it?
As for the robes, 20 pounds is a lot of money. Scheme or not! Are the totally necessary for privacy? If not I would cut them out! One extra thing means more extras to handle and more things to fuss and worry about. Even if you are not concerned about the cost, dealing with extra things takes time. And time is money.
Look at your bottom line and see if these extras make sense and give benefit (better reviews). If not, eliminate!
Looks like sound advice; we don’t yet have any reviews so we are trying to go the extra mile (or kilometre).
We have a 3-br apartment in Montreux we let out, but the letting is handled by an on-site agency and they provide robes so we thought it a good idea for London – we’re in a high-rent district. Of course the Swiss agency has a commercial laundry of the sort that do hotels’ washing so what do they care. We have to schlep the London linen to our place (around the corner, so no big deal) because the rental flat has only a washer/dryer which would take forever.
Short-term rentals are a lot of work, maybe not worth the (relatively small, unless you are fully booked) extra compared to long-term rentals here. And then we have the lunatics in Whitehall and in the local government who complain that short-term lets (and, for that matter, “cold beds” – i.e. apartments owned by Russian and Chinese investors) remove property from the market and keep “real people” (read: voters) from living locally.
As if those voters could afford to rent anyway. The only long-term renters we have had in the past were company-sponsored. (And under new laws, the Government wants landlords to check the passports of renters to see if they are illegal or not. As if landlords could be experts in the passports and ID cards of all 28 EU Member States, plus the EEA (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein), plus Switzerland; and all the various visa stamps and stickers. And the fines for a mistake are draconian.
But, hey, the USA thinks expatriates and migrants can be a profit centre too: heard of FATCA and PFIC?
I’m with chicagohost - If it’s not something really bad, I just write “guest stayed in X apartment for 5 days” then if it’s a great guest experience, I specify why it was good “great communication, respectful of my place and my rules, left apartment in excellent condition”, etc.
I totally get why we should write more explicit reviews, I just think that for me, I don’t feel good about being super picky about something like dirty dishes in the sink. I’d rather tell the guest in private comments “hey, you left dirty dishes in the sink and used your shoes inside, both of which are no-no’s. I thought I’d tell you privately rather then include this in the public review”. I always look at guest reviews and sometimes I think the host can go a bit overboard when maybe the issue was lack of house rules, bad communication of expectations, etc. I dunno…this is always a tough one.
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Everyone I’ve rented to has had either glowing reviews or no reviews at all, which is completely at odds with what some of them are like as guests. It’s really disheartening to rent to someone who treats my home like a motel and me like motel staff, and I know from reading this forum and airbnbhell that I’m not the only host who experiences guests like this. The only way we’ll know in advance is if we leave honest reviews–my most recent guest-from-hell had 7 glowing reviews that focused entirely on the fact that he left the house clean, leaving out his entitlement and carelessness–as if they were looking only for the good points and leaving out the bad or mentioning the bad only to him in private comments.
If a host leaves a private comment for the guest, the guest may or may not change that behavior depending on their personality, and future hosts won’t know what they’re getting themselves into. Entitled guests are also more likely to leave bad reviews, something which may be a problem for new hosts without many reviews.
My new review policy is to describe my experience hosting them in detail and let other hosts make up their own minds with the information provided. The reviews are not just for the guest’s sake, they’re to let other hosts know what it’s like to rent to them. With guest-from-hell above, I really don’t care that he was clean as I can clean the house myself. I care much more that he expected me to run to the store for him like his personal assistant, didn’t offer to pay for the things he wanted me to fetch for him and then gave me a negative review–I wasn’t “very accommodating” because, while I did agree to go to the store for him, I asked him to pay for the things he wanted (bar soap because he didn’t like my body wash, and flavored coffee creamer because he didn’t like the half & half I’d provided).
I also agree with a comment above that airbnb should offer a 5-star system for guests as well, so I’ve simply started using my own in my reviews. This is the system I use:
Overall experience
Cleanliness
Communication
Respect for owner
Respect for home/house rules
I’m done erring on the side of being polite and reserved in my reviews, because they sure as hell don’t offer me the same courtesy.
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Such perfect language for a situation I find myself in right now. I was thinking about how I’d suggest that my guest in question “would be happier in an first class hotel like environment with 24/7 support staff”
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Ugh… How dare he… This is the kind of entitled guest that makes this business such a burn out at times.
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Absolutely leave a review, if you don’t want to bitch you leave the bare facts about how long they stayed. It’s more about what you don’t say. And then learn, if you can, from that type of person/booking. My experience has been mostly that when I think someone isn’t going to be so great, they really are.
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I do something similar… if they were really bad i will leave a honest review. if they were just medicore, not great, maybe did small irritating things, being late or inconsiderate or complaining, i dont leave them a review. i have over 200 great ones myself so trying to get more reviews isnt too key at this point.
When i leave a review for someone i liked, I will always add that i recommend this guest… to me its a clear signal to any other host( and myself in the future if they book again) that this is a desirable guest.
I also do note when people say they have traveled on airbnb and have no reviews…I ometimes dont agree to host them.
Im not suggesting others follow my method and I fully understand a lot of people think you should leave a review no matter what but I am just responding to the original poster as to my personal choice in this matter.
Sharp point. I often wonder if Airbnb uses guest rating to match guests and hosts in order to provide the more optimal experience possible -which doesn’t mean the best possible experience. For example, Airbnb could be matching not-recommended guest with hosts that seem more generous (or less demanding) in their review in order to improve hosting experience, or in the other side, matching picky guests with super host in order to improve guest experience.
A rather belated question, but how does a future host of X contact you directly? Airbnb makes host to host contacting very difficult; practically impossible, really. I once tried to contact a host by using the inquiry form to ask a perfectly innocent question. She accused me of committing fraud. Another time I contacted someone the same way, and that person completely misunderstood my message. I’m still not sure what he thought I was asking.
If there is any good way for an Airbnb host to contact another Airbnb host, I’d be very interested to hear about it.
You have no right to force the guests to step on your dirty floor with hongkongfeet.
I don’t think it’s that difficult ?
You go to the reviews of the guest who has requested to stay - > check on a review from a previous host -> go to that hosts listing then click on:
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Yes, but “Contact Host” in this context means you are making an inquiry about staying at his/her place. And you’re forced to fill in dates. And the host is expecting a booking inquiry, and may be peeved you are asking about something else. As I said, in the two previous instances I tried it, it did not go well.
… I think it might have just been those two hosts. If another host contact me this way I wouldn’t mind.
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I wouldn’t mind either, but the fact remains that one is using a method that is intended for purpose A to do purpose B, and that has the potential to make people unhappy. And it’s not clear what Airbnb would think of it, but they might not be happy either.
It’s like someone phoning a US President using the Red Hotline to ask him what to have on the White House menu tomorrow. 
A proper and preferably efficient method for host to talk to host would be a Good Thing, in my opinion. Case in point, I recently had a booking request from a couple of American kids. One of them had a one-line review, which was less than positive. Something like “they left everything a little bit dirty when they left”. If I could have easily contacted the host to ask him what the hell he was talking about, I would’ve. But I couldn’t, so I didn’t.
Having looked at the kid’s online presence (Facebook pages etc.) I decided they were harmless. So I accepted their request. But really people, if you are going to write a freaking negative review, don’t make it an ambiguous one line one!