Just telling my story here: I currently have a guest, a young man in his early 20’s, who booked a week’s stay in my Airbnb Room, which has a separate entrance. Right after he checked in a car pulled up in front of the house and lingered, then drove away, which was odd to me. The next morning when I left to go to work there was a different car in the driveway and a man was just getting out. He saw me, got back in the car and drove off. So, checking my Ring camera videos I saw that 4 different older men had parked in my driveway and gone inside the room, each one staying for 10-15 minutes. The guest walked around outside nervously looking out for each one to arrive. I called Airbnb and they asked me to send a message to the guest saying that only registered guests can visit and that he needs to meet his “friends” elsewhere. Since I did not specify “no visits” in my listing, just no overnight guests, and since I don’t have proof that there was illegal activity, they did not want to cancel the reservation, although they said they were sensitive to the fact that I felt uncomfortable. The guest responded that he hadn’t known he wasn’t allowed to have visitors. Since then as far as I can tell nobody else has been inside his unit. I will be happy when this stay is over. A lot of my guests have family or friends in the area who stop by to see them, so I haven’t wanted to have a strict no visitor policy. But this creeped me out and I will have to rethink this. Another interesting Airbnb experience.
Just add in a house rule that if your guests want to have visitors, can they let you know in advance.
In this way you can be flexible but prevent the sort of behaviour described above.
I require that they provide selfies of guest, full name, address and age and have to be pre-approved 2 days before their arrival. Additionally I say that I may ask for photo id upon arrival. This eliminates the “bad actors” such as pimps, sex jobs, drug deals, etc. (It’s all happened at my place until I got wise.)
Sounds like he’s doing “business” in your place. Four different older men and only 10 to 15 min visits sounds like “quickies” to me.
Yes, I assumed sex work. And/or selling drugs.
Yes, this is a good idea, have them tell me in advance. I am not home during the day, so I can’t control what goes on, but at least then I’d have grounds to ask them to leave.
I work away from home and can’t tell you what a wonderful thing a video doorbell is (or other security camera). In good circumstances I can check it before doing noisy things at home, or guests can “ring” me to get help with the door, etc. In sketchy situations it gives video evidence you can provide to Airbnb.
Ring doorbell is how I know about the visitors - so glad to have it.
As others have said, I highly recommend using at least one security camera in the entry way. I use Arlo Q instead of the doorbell cams since you can plug it in and it’s 1080p.
If you want to discourage this start photographing license plates. These are undeclared visitors on your property.
This guest does not have a car. But yes I could take photos of future guests’ license plates in case I need to take legal action. Current guest has not had more callers, in fact I haven’t seen him on video for 2 days.
I’m curious why you called Airbnb rather than dealing with this situation yourself? As in… what did you actually expect a CS telephone support worker to actually DO?
I called Airbnb to have it on the record. For me that was the way to go. I didn’t expect them to DO anything. I didn’t know if the situation would escalate.
Good point. I didn’t think of that. Probably because I’d rather put on boxing gloves and tackle a guest myself than call CS!
Update on my guest: he had a couple more men over after midnight, right before he left. He is gone now. I wrote a review saying that I was not comfortable with the guest because of the multiple visitors, etc. He responded that he did not have visitors, the people who came over were delivering food. That really made me mad. Also I am afraid men are going to come looking for him and knock on the Airbnb door when my next guests are here. Hopefully his customers realized this was not a permanent location. Also, he lives locally! I have learned several lessons.
I am sure they were NOT delivery folks… but FYI I had a man book here once and got food delivered 5 times in one evening. He was a bulemic and I suppose he thought that this was a ‘safe’ place to do this. It was sad. But if they cane and left VERY quickly, maybe he was telling the truth, altho i think not…
TBH, his friends/“activity partners” probably have more to fear from you than you do from them. In any case, no one is going to show up now that the guy has left.
My nest hello doorbell camera is plugged in and although not quite 1080p it is to get more vertical field of vision for seeing full body and packages on the ground.
Although I am NOT HAPPY with the change in nest since google took it over of not being able to turn off the green status light, especially since it blinks brighter when being observed.
I had a NEST cam until a thief used a ladder to steal it. I couldn’t even get a video of the thief because as soon as the thief added it to a new account it erased all of the stored video. Yes. Google allows anyone to delete your video if they get the camera and reformat it.
Storing video with Arlo is free. It also stores it in an encrypted server that has a much better interface.