Recently I’ve been reading here accounts of hosts who carefully document the state of their place before guests arrive, and wondering how frequently that becomes necessary to make a claim after a stay, or refute a lying guest.
I remember once staying at a lovely home in Tasmania where there was a document posted prominently in the kitchen listing every single kitchen item (“whisk - 2; forks - 12; pie tin - 2, etc”). I remember thinking, “Wow, there’s an unhappy story behind that list!”
When we started letting our place on Airbnb, we had a property manager who said, “Take out anything expensive and anything that you care about.” I whined, “But I want to put nice things here. I like it when I stay at places that have nice things!” and she said, “People are going to steal things or lose things and I’d rather take the hit and replace your stolen items at my own expense than ask guests for the missing items and risk getting a bad review and losing my superhost status.” O_O
I’m a new host and lucky enough that so far I’ve had lovely guests. But I keep wondering: what kind of nightmare guest will I encounter in the future? And should I be trying to protect myself against the rare terrible guest, or is it too much effort and I should just deal when it happens?
So I would love for people here to comment on:
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What’s something a guest did that made you change how you do things at your Airbnb? (e.g. documenting items in the house in case of theft, making new house rules; putting up signs, etc.), and
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On reflection, do you think that change was worth it? (e.g. in taking time to document the state of the home before each stay, do you think it’s worth the effort in protecting you against the rare dishonest or bad guest? If you wrote some very specific new house rule, do you think it stops people from doing weird things?)