At last sanity! My main issue is he just didn’t communicate. What was stopping him from giving me a call? Occasionally self check in might be necessary, but it will jolly well be arranged by me, agreed and communicated. I do not expect guests to dictate the manner of check in on the hoof.
All’s well that ends well, then! Regardless of advice here, you need to do what makes you feel comfortable as a host. We all have different approaches.
Absolutely. The idea of a guest I have never met rooting around my home, possibly opening doors to my family’s private bedrooms to find their room whilst I am not there, makes me sick to the stomach and my skin crawl. An English woman’s home is her castle. He’s from the same culture so knows his behaviour is morally wrong at the deepest level. I can’t remember the last time I felt so invaded.
Hosting may not be for you if having a stranger in your home makes you react in this way.
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You are quite wrong. How can you say a guest going round opening private family bedroom doors whilst the host is out, because they have not followed check in arrangements, is in any way representative of normal hosting? It’s the first guest in more than 3 years to have done so. For you to suggest such a thing adds insult to injury, and is quite bullying. I wonder what drives you to be so unkind, as well as not grasping what seems a very simple concept.
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Utter nonsense. How on earth would you even know where your room was, when entering a stranger’s family home with 11 unlabelled doors to rooms? Completely inappropriate. Your only hope would be a process of elimination by opening private doors. Disgusting behaviour, I don’t believe you would actually do that at all.
Drama queen? You make it sound like he is some random guy from the street invading your space. This person rented a room that you offer up for rent who accessed said room. Maybe not to your wishes, but it was not some vindictive event that you make it out to be.
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More insults! He was a stranger to me. Just because he booked on an online platform that’s no reason to disregard all normal manners and social convention.
I did not say vindictive, I said pushy, impatient, uncommunicative and uncaring of how his actions would make the host feel. Not good qualities in a guest.
Look we live in a culture where most of us still live in houses with rooms with doors (maybe also with a big open plan family room). Our doors traditionally even open in a private way (not against the nearest wall), so you can’t see into the whole room. We are a very private culture, especially with people we’ve never met. He is aware of all this yet still behaved the way he did. Unacceptable.
On a level of weirdness scale this would hardly register, most people are fine but you will come across odd to very odd situations. So what haooens when you get one of those?
I can understand people who value their privacy, I know a few, no problem there, but they do not list on AirBnB.
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Sorry but it’s not normal for a guest to enter a family home whilst they’re out and not even know which one is their room. Never had it in 3 + years and won’t again probably. Do we really want guests like this on the platform? How many of you really want guests randomly opening your bedroom doors whilst you’re out. I don’t believe you’re really ok with that.
Common suggestion here for Hosts who have things happen that they’re not comfortable with it to simply deflect them before they happen. For instance, lock your bedroom door when you leave if you have other guests in the house; problem one solved. Many hosts hang a small plaque or a number on the door that their guest is using, and they put this in their entry instructions for instants go down the hall and look for door number one with your name on it. Problem two solved. If your access window for your guest is too narrow or you find that you need your situation different, a keyless lock allows you to determine when people have access. Problem three solved.
The occasional guest might do something that makes you slightly uncomfortable, if it happens once just ignore it if it happens more than once look to a solution rather than blame
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@Jess1 I would never leave my bedroom door unlocked when I am expecting or have guests, so this would never happen.
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Keeping a door such as a guest bedroom door locked to prevent entry until you’re ready to unlock it personally; problem four solved.
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Sorry @Jess1, but it now seems you’re almost more angry at people’s response to your complaint than at the original infraction itself. Everyone here gets that you were very upset by this guest’s actions, but it’s obvious that for most of us it’s not a huge deal. So we can sympathise with your reaction but not empathise with it, if you see what I mean …
We all look at this sort of thing differently … I’m afraid it’s just one of those topsheet/duvet, shoes on/off, guns good/guns bad things. We can discuss it endlessly but finally we just have to agree to disagree!
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@Jess1 imagine if he’d got there on time and the check-in went fine…you would’ve had this monster in your house for his entire stay!
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Argh! All this talk of locks within my private family home. How horrible! Guests are usually appropriate and respectful, so it’s not needed! The vast majority of my guests would miss the trusting atmosphere I am sure. Check in is designed around host meet and greet and it all works!
The simple fact is this guest totally disrespected the agreed check in arrangements. He went in my home when I was out which he had no business to do. The meet and greet process involves, wait for it, showing them their room (and other spaces they might need like the shower). Therefore there is never normally any cause nor opportunity for guests to open my private rooms! So, why would I want the inconvenience and unhomely atmosphere of locks on bedrooms?
I am just frustrated here because there seems to be no understanding of different styles of hosting which work, and no appreciation that all the problems arose because the guest went against what was agreed, not because I have any lack of locks or anything else.
You might have a completely different topic, and if the guest went against what was agreed they would likewise be at fault, not you! I hope you would find more support, whatever the issue was.
Musings on a boring day: The OP has posted 15 or 16 times now (make that 17) to her own thread and it’s all repetitive. She already solved her own problem by booting the guest from her home. As I predicted, the majority of hosts would have handled it differently.
Is it time to leave this dead horse in the street (or shall we play some more). 
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when people disagree with you, that’s because they have a different style of hosting…which you don’t seem to understand.
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But I don’t need signs on doors, or lock boxes etc if I am not doing self check in, do I? It’s like you’re totally obsessed with self check in. Actually self check in makes up a tiny minority of the British B&B industry, most is meet and greet. And I don’t have a problem that has happened more than once, this creep of a guest is the first to follow someone into my property.
Think of it this way then, say your guest agrees to your beloved self check in when they book. Then, at the last minute on check in day they somehow hijack things to force you to do meet and greet when that’s not what you want to do and you’re not prepared for it. You’d be pissed off right? Right.
Part of the problem is that we expect guests to telepathically, automatically, magically understand. They don’t. To them, Airbnb is Airbnb. We should (in their minds) all be the same. When they come across someone who reacts outside the normal host activity, it reflects badly on us all.
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