For those of you who are in the UK, how do you get guests who have broken your rules to get out of your house?
I can’t imagine British police caring if I was to call them. Would they?
What are my options? What’s the procedure?
I have to say, you sound REALLY nervous about having guests in your home. I think the chances of you having to do a forceful eviction of a guest is slim to none.
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Nah, his mum’s going to do it and I have every faith in her 
To some extent, that’s true because I’m the one who convinced my parents to go down the Airbnb route (after a long spell of no tenants)!
Buuuuuuut, with that said, the reason why I’m posting so much about negative stuff right now is simply because I want to empower myself with SOP’s for worst-case scenarios. That way, if they ever happen (and I’m sure they will eventually, even 1 out of 100), I and my mum will be very well prepared for it. At least that’s the theory! 
Thankfully I have only had to get 2 guests to leave in 3 and a half years. One was a controlling narcissist and Airbnb skillfully manipulated him to go elsewhere with a voucher. The other was an entitled PITA who I got to demonstrate on the app that he had no intention of stopping breaking my rules and Airbnb cancelled his reservation. I would hate to have to waste police time removing such people, but would have done if they had tried to trespass on my property after they had been cancelled.
I agree with other posters that parenting/teaching experience is useful. Don’t ever doubt you are never paid enough to be disrespected in your own home.
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I’ve had a couple of instances, but never needed to be heavy handed. There was one where a group of 5 had booked and when the cleaner arrived at 10 there was a man still there, in bed. When the cleaner said she wanted to start work he told her to go and clean somewhere else and come back after 12 as the guy who booked said he could stay till lunchtime! She phoned me, I phoned the guy who booked, he didn’t answer, nor did he ever return my many messages. My cleaner is no push over so she started busying herself around, making noise etc. He got up, told her that he had to have a shower, to come back in an hour. She didn’t budge but was furious when she saw him out the side having a cigarette and not a shower!! He eventually left.
Twice the cleaner has turned up to find that the guests aren’t there but all there stuff is! The first time she also found that the phone I was trying to contact them on was in the villa! I phoned Air who weren’t helpful at all, just said they would call them. I said: well if you have the same number as me that’s no use. Luckily the cleaner found a receipt beside the bed which had the wife’s number on it and she answered, they thought they had booked for 2 nights. We had this happen again not long ago so this time we didn’t panic so much.
I also had another guest contact me last night to say that she was looking at her reservation for November and she thought she had booked for 2 nights but it said she had booked for 1 night. I said: that is right, you have booked for 1 night. So we nearly had it happen again.
There was one thing that a senior Airbnb case manager did say to me that I found helpful: one thing I have learn’t from doing this job is not to rush, things do often resolve themselves with time. However when you have other guests checking in in a few hours and you are looking at a messy villa with other guest’s stuff everywhere it is quite daunting to know where to start!
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Assuming you don’t have guests coming that day and you can let them stay in, how does one manage the change? Is there an option to do this through the Airbnb interface?
Are you talking about them extending their stay, booking another night? If so this has to be done by the host and when you get a confirmed reservation there is a link/button on it that says “change reservation”. The Air system is quite straight forward to use.
If your Mum’s not available, fly me down to London and I’ll do my Professor McGonagall/Maggie Smith impression. It never fails.
Seriously, though, your question is almost impossible to answer no matter what country you’re in. There needs to be a sliding scale of violations from…
- guests having major noisy party, destroying property, spilling on to street, fighting. That’s a police matter and your neighbours will have already called them!
to… - someone slept on the couch without any protective bedding, You won’t know about that until they’ve left. In fact, you may never know that it even happened.
This is the inherent risk involved in this business. The only things you can do are
- do everything you can to head off troublemakers before they even think about booking
- have someone close by to monitor things if you’re not in the area yourself
- be unafraid to tackle difficult guests right at the start of any bad behaviour. And be stern. 99.9% of bad guests will comply after a stern firm rebuke no matter how mouthy they are.
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It wouldn’t be a police ie criminal matter @Fahed. It would be a civil matter and therefore up to you as the host to resolve.
It’s not a matter of the police not caring, rather that is not their responsibility.
As hosts we have to be prepared to deal with the unpleasant as well as the pleasant however it would be highly unusual for a host to have to ask a guest to leave, who refuses to do so. I would imagine if that happened you would want to go up with a friend or two and deal with it in person.
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