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Ha! A 30 db reduction sound from the door, a mortise and lock making more noise than a different kind of lock. You’re pretty professional, though I didn’t see anything about standard deviations or confidence intervals, but maybe that’s in the long email.
Ouch! Regrettably, I’m not the one here to advise you on pith.
But @muddy makes the point of using bullet points (consider for listing too). So maybe you can edit your long email to make it more easily readable even if you cannot cut the length. Alternatively, you could share that long email and folks here will give you plenty of suggestions.
Yes, but I believe though cannot prove that when you have their attention you can get them to read.
I believe they’ll read before your call (if you ask them to; if they don’t just go to the sections and read it together) and they’ll read correspondence right up to the booking.
Then the next time they’ll look at things is probably just the correspondence the few days before the check-in date (or whenever you send them a note, which I send five days before and then another one day before check-in).
I also resisted for a long time, and also didn’t like that it is owned by Facebook (which I have never used). But it makes it difficult here, as most people use whatsapp to communicate- not just guests, but tradespeople I need to communicate with, etc. They don’t even have email addresses, and even if they do, most Mexicans don’t answer emails, even so-called “professionals”.
Also, I can call my brother in Australia and my step-mom in the UK without incurring any long distance charges. And call or text anyone with a whatsapp account, even if my pay-as-you-go phone time has run out.
It varies, but I usually get much better phone call connections on whatsapp than the regular phone line.
Not even slightly interested in joining Facebook.
I disagree here, I’ve had my check-in window set from 3:00-7:00 for 6 of my 7 years. I am retired and go to bed early. If someone asks, I can make exceptions, and do often, but after I had a guest ask to check in early, then kept pushing it back until they finally arrived at 2:00 am, I’m over it. Does not seem to affect my bookings!
Once they got on the island they went straight to a bar, got trashed, and fell asleep on the beach. That’s fine and good and we all did it in our youth, but if you know someone is waiting up to let you in their home, shame on you. They also got up at 10:30, checkout is 11:00, and had a bag of eggs, bacon and pancake mix and prepared to cook. Nope. I don’t share my kitchen and if I did, you don’t have enough time for that shit.
Hi, @faheem. Welcome back!
It sounds like your guest didn’t want to stay at your place for some reason that she could not cancel for and get a refund (maybe had a fight with male companion?), so she found a loophole that would let her get her money back. She’s a lawyer, after all - that’s what they do.
It stinks that this happened, but you are out of luck since your listing did say “beachfront” when it isn’t.
Give her a short review mentioning her careless attitude towards check in time and bringing additional people, and then focus on getting AirBnB to make it right for you since you never checked beachfront. You may not have luck there, but it’s at least something to try.
Could well be as @PitonView said that they were looking for an ‘out’ (and they have this ‘out’),
It seems to me that you’re asking the guest to put a lot of cognitive effort into understanding your place – that it would have no beach based on its location.
My perspective as a guest would be ‘How do I know if there’s a beach?’ The listing says it has one. I live in Worcester MA, an hour from the ocean. But I see Airbnb places cited as beachfront because they’re on a lake. I didn’t know we had lakes around here (and I’ve been living here for five+ years). So, as a prospective guest I’m going to want to take everything in the listing as ‘the truth’. [Plus, to me, the beach is on the ocean. If I had lakeside property here I’d be sure to specify in the listing that we’re on a lake.]
As a prospective guest I might not know if your beaches are nice. Maybe this guest did know and we’re back to they were looking for an out.
The silver lining is that eventually your listing, communication and practices will be (almost) bullet proof.
I think you misunderstood my meaning- I wasn’t suggesting that it’s fine for guests to show up whenever they please within the check-in time if a host checks guests in personally, as I do, when they have already given you an ETA but not bothered to advise you that they won’t be arriving until later.
I just meant that if you say you have a check-in window from 4-7, that if a guest tells you they will arrive around 5, it isn’t really acceptable to then tell them, “Oh, I have a dinner date, I won’t be home until 6:45”.
That’s totally different from a guest asking to arrive at 2, you agreeing, and then have them leave you waiting all afternoon, unable to leave the house because they didn’t have the respect to update their arrival time, and they might arrive whenever.
And if it’s a matter of them already have given you an arrival time of 4, so you go ahead and make dinner plans, and then wanting to change the time to 5:30, which would mean you having to cancel your plans, I don’t feel we need to agree to that, although I do usually try to accommodate if possible. I’m more inclined to want to accommodate if a change of ETA is outside the guest’s control, like being stuck in traffic, or having a delayed flight, than if they just decided to go out for lunch or shopping, disrespecting my time.
I know he said the guest should be familiar with the area. I was making the point that I’ve lived here for five+ years and I didn’t know of the lakes we have around here. So who knows?
So maybe the guys didn’t know or maybe they did (were clever).
I think the message for the OP is to decide what he will learn from this and what, if anything, he should do differently going forward.
One things @faheem should consider is a policy of not saying any such thing to a guest.
There’s no advantage to doing so, and by alerting a guest that they’re getting a bad review a guest could decide to make anticipatory allegations (hidden/undisclosed cameras, safety issues) that seriously hurt a Host.
Of course, the guest could do that anyway but now:
they KNOW a bad review is coming, and
depending on how that threat was communicated or received, unhealthy emotions could get stirred. That the guest might have some local connections makes this possibility more concerning.
So there’s no advantage to this (not saying that this is how the threat was conveyed):
Sigh. So, the guest is a lawyer, as already mentioned. And worked in the Bombay High Court. And she says she worked there for 10 years. Which is also confirmed by her Linkedin page (9 years 9 months, to be precise). The High Court is 2.6 km (1.6 miles) away from me, according to Google. Furthermore, the Western Railway. runs on the other side of the road that I live on, and the Marine Lines railway station is quite close; within walking distance. This is also the second to last station on the Western Line. The last station is Churchgate, where the Western Line ends. Now, anyone working at the High Court would be very familiar with my area, because not only is it quite well known and very central, they would have passed by it all the time taking trains and coming and going. Basically any lawyer working at the HC would certainly be using the Western Line to come and go to the suburbs. Also, just the name of my area, Marine Lines, would be enough for a local person. Everyone knows Marine Lines is nowhere near a beach. It’s a relatively small area. And there are no lakes around here. Plus, the guest said she was familiar with the nearby church, as I would expect her to be. And I sent her my address in advance, with a description and landmarks. The idea that she would expect my place to be on a beach front is ridiculous. It’s obviously just a way to cheat me.
Yes, of course. But I lost my temper. I’m only human, after all. I actually don’t do that often. Living in a lunatic asylum like India, one gets a lot of practice in controlling ones emotions. If one was to fly off the handle over every little thing, that would be a recipe for some serious health issues. And I’ve actually become relatively good at dealing with the little batty things guests do. But the important thing to note is that the things guests do are rarely done out of malice. I just cope less well with liars and cheats.
This obvious and blatant attempt to cheat me was so insane and unexpected. And coming on top of the guest making more than an average nuisance of herself the day before, it was just too much.
Yes, the optimum thing would have been to say nothing and let her leave. Again, just human.
Yes, she might write some lies about my place. Or not leave a review at all, which I think is more likely. Who knows? <Shrug.>
My point is that you don’t know, can’t know, that it’s irrelevant, that you’re probably right, but so what? Because you don’t know and can’t know her mind it’s irrelevant.
What’s really going on is that you feel cheated and put together everything that could to put this guest in the worst light. But you came to the forum for feedback and I don’t think anyone is telling you to raise that argument with Airbnb customer service, because there’s no there there.
Oh jeez. If I had a guest who had lived in my town before (which I have had), they know exactly where the beach is in relation to the map of where my place is. They would absolutely know that the beach wasn’t across the road from my house, without me having to tell them.
And if you asked me where the beach is in Chicago, I know where it is.
But I didn’t know about lakes in Worcester MA despite living here five years. For all I know that Airbnb on the lake was a mile from a place I frequent (I’m not good on spatial things).
My first point was that you don’t KNOW.
My second point is that it’s highly unlikely for the OP to use this successfully as persuasive to the Airbnb customer service rep because the fact that the amenity list is wrong would likely trump the likelihood that the guest knew better than the Host’s own listing.
Surely it’s not likely that the guest knew that at least in the states awhile ago there had been a bug that corrupted the amenity lists.
Here’s the test on relevance of this. Are you advising the OP to make the point to Airbnb customer service that it should not cancel the reservation because the guest would surely have known that there was no beach there? If not, why are are we having this exchange?
Faheem, they did some update on this forum software about six months ago and since then, when you highlight something you want to quote, you have to scroll quite a ways down to see that grey “Quote” box and click on it. Sometimes it’s hard to see because it’s overlaid on other posts.
Yes, I belatedly realised that. Poor design, or implementation, or whatever it is. I don’t think it was down so far before. Someone should point this out to the people who maintain the software, though I don’t know who that is. I’m happy to post a message if someone can tell me where to post it to.
Anyway, thanks for pointing it out. Much appreciated. My OCD is now telling me to go back and fix all the other posts. I’m not sure if I’m going to do that, though. One doesn’t always have to listen to the demon on ones shoulder.
But can’t the guest delete her profile and create a new one? Poof, all reviews gone; but in this case, only one - mine. I don’t understand the relevance of the Verified ID. Yes, I know what it is.
Also, she just left a review. But I don’t think I’ll leave one just now. I’ll wait till the end of the review period like I usually do these days. But I’ll certainly leave a review. It’s a host to host obligation, after all. And if the guest is problematic, it seems to me even more of an obligation.
Understood and agreed. I’ll post a revised draft of a proposed review at some point, obviously before the review period is up, and hope people are still interested in commenting.
This message is mostly to let you know that I uploaded the image of the note that you sent me. Some Airbnb rep contacted me yesterday, referring to himself as a Support Ambassador (seriously, who comes up with this stuff?), and blathered on a bit about feedback and assistance, so I just uploaded that image to that thread, and also wrote a note. It is a bit long, but I’m including it below, between #s. I did not take much in writing it, but in the context it’s not worth much effort.
I really appreciate you sending me this note from Airbnb. Even though by far the most likely outcome is that I will be blown off (I may not even receive a reply), it was very helpful.
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This is a followup to this issue. To summarize, the guest cancelled the reservation and was refunded most of the money, overriding my Cancellation Policy, because my listing said “beach front” when it isn’t.
In this context, I have two things to say.
First, can you provide proof that the listing actually said beach front in the list of amenities? I just saw a screenshot that said “Beach access: guests can enjoy a nearby beach”. It is earlier in this thread.
Second, as I already mentioned, I did not make this change, as already stated, and so this inaccuracy was not caused by me. I believe this amenity change was made due to an Airbnb bug. Please see the attached image. Given the possibility of this bug, I do not believe I should be penalised for something that I am not responsible, and which is not my fault.
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@faheem I have certainly read about guests deleting their profile and creating a new one to get rid of a bad review, but I don’t know if it’s really that common. I think Airbnb may have caught on to that, and it may be more difficult than it used to be.
And since I’ve read plenty of bad guest reviews, obviously all guests don’t just delete their account.
In any case, it isn’t anything we have control over, so there’s no reason to concern ourselves with that if we have to write an honest review of a bad guest.
As I would have expected, Airbnb came back with an idiotic canned response to the post I made (see a couple of messages up). See below.
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Hi Faheem,
Thank you for your response.
I get your point, however we cannot overturn a decision.
Also, we have no option to make any changes on the Host’s listing, this can only be done from the Host end, so it’s clearly not a bug from our side.
The listing is categorized as a beach so it’s a Host violation.
You can check it by going to your Listing description and Manage Listing.
I hope the above information helps.
Regards,
Rishabh
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It’s comical that they just keep repeating that it’s not a bug at their end, when I provide evidence that it could be a bug at their end.
I was wondering. I’ve heard that people have going through social media when Airbnb screwed them over, though maybe that’s only when their houses got trashed?
In any case, I’d be willing to post on social media if anyone can tell me where a good place would be to post. Though I am barely on social media myself (a Facebook page I never use, and also on Twitter), and have no followers or anything like that.
Would Airbnb’s Facebook page be a possibility, for example? If I posted there, could they not just delete it?
