Why do you say all you can do is fine?
Our house rules say that if you smoke inside or outside (on the property) that we can eject you and the stay can be cancelled without refund.
Do you think that is unenforceable? We haven’t had to test it yet.
From what I understand about trees, if the entire circumference has been girded, the tree will die.
Trees with wounds can heal. Look on the internet to get some ideas of what you might do to help the tree.
When I was setting up our booking dot com listing, the CS rep would not let me put in a rule that we would evict smokers. I had to explain to her that the fine she proposed ($200US) was under $5 US a day per guest for six guests for a week - less than the cost of the cigarettes. (Our listing is inactive on BDC for that reason, among others.)
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I say this as someone who has a biology degree and is a master gardener – any damage to a tree causes stress and creates a breach in the physical barrier that protects an intact plant from infection. Damage creates risks the tree will be infected (insects, virus, fungus) or suffer diminished growth or a shorter lifespan.
If you damaged a thousand trees and compared them to a thousand undamaged trees for their lifespan (decades) the damaged trees will, on average, not do as well as the intact trees by almost any biological metric. That is why those who can afford to do so often get an arborist to come in and patch up trees that are damaged in a front lawn or a municipal park
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I agree with Spark (also a biologist and MG). Talk to an arborist, get a quote.
We had a delivery truck drive through our yard, hit our car, and take out a bunch of ornamental shrubs. They ended up reimbursing us $1000 for the yard damage - $500 to replace the plants, and about the same for labor. But trees the size of your oak are essentially irreplaceable.
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I’d guess most of us have been drunk on occasion. Did that cause any of you to purposely destroy other people’s property? I might have accidentally knocked over a glass, but that’s about it.
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Trees are incredibly resilient, especially Oak trees, I should post some trees almost completely chewed in half by beavers but not felled that end up staying alive.
I don’t think the issue is the tree’s life, the issue is to warn other hosts and to punish the perpetrator if you so wish.
The way to do so is via the review and to create a billable fee that you can submit to Airbnb that the guest will have to pay, to do that as I think has been said hire an arborist, pay the bill and get reimbursed out of the guest’s pocket through airbnb.
Of course this is all dependent on how much you want to teach this person a lesson or not. But the tree I’m sure is going to be just fine. It’s a stupid drunken act of course and sucks but really the only harm is in this idiot probably has a lifetime full of stuff like this and are you contributing to a wake up call
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