Guests write before booking to negotiate rates for the prime week of the prime month and I say sorry no but good luck finding a place. Then, much to my disappointment, they book anyhow. Stay away from the negotiators! ha ha. A few weeks before arrival, guests update the reservation to include a dog, then write to say it’s a service dog and ask if there’s a fee. I say no and tell them they can just remove the dog from the reservation to avoid paying the fee (is there a better way to adjust the reservation to keep the pet but disclose that it’s a service animal?) Anyhow long story short, the guests were okay but bizarre communications and a few issues but they were relatively minor. Anyhow, the real kicker is that at one point I had to go out to the cabin to charge the solar batteries because guests had hacked into the locked thermostat cover and turned on the furnace which drained the batteries (I have propane wall heaters which I tell guests to use for heat in all of my communications). Before I go out, guests write and say, “Oh, you’ll see our French bulldog when you’re at the cabin.” Well I have a way of “spying” on guests through my cloud solar monitoring system and from 10ish in the morning (guests told me they would be leaving) to about 7 pm, I know the dog was left unattended. When I go to the cabin around noon to charge the batteries, I find pup and also see right away that the guests have a puppy pee pad with fake grass on my stained concrete floor 
so it’s clear the dog isn’t potty trained for that length of time. How can you have a service dog and not need the service dog to be with you at all times??? Sigh…anyhow, just needed to get that out. At least I haven’t found any damage so far in my exhaustive walk through of the cabin. In the end, I’ve decided not to take any action although I explicitly state that dogs can not be left unattended without a crate and I know AirBnB is strict about this too, but I suppose these weird guests just wore me down. But I am going to ding them for the artwork they broke (they disclosed that to me when it happened) and the thermal coffee carafe handle they melted (did not disclose that).
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Leave an honest and detailed review.
I wouldn’t characterize these guests as “weird”, I’d call them entitled and careless liars. Hacking into your locked thermostat cover? Breaking and melting things? Claiming a clearly not service dog and ignoring your crating rule?
And I’d bet the pee pad wasn’t just used that one time- I’ll bet that dog does it’s business inside on pee pads all the time.
P.S. There is no such thing as “potty training” a dog. Either the dog owner walks it regularly, so it is used to doing its business outside, or they are too lazy to do that, let the dog go inside and use pee pads or just clean up the mess.
Any living creature will relieve itself wherever is convenient if not given access to appropriate facilities.
And some dogs are just naturally clean and won’t foul their own nest. My most recent dog, who was free to roam around my countryside neighborhood during the day, wouldn’t even pee in my yard. She used to trot off to the back of a big field behind me to do her business. When I travelled with her and stayed with friends who had a fully fenced yard she couldn’t get out of, I looked in the morning for where she might have had a dump, to clean it up, and after searching all over, I finally found it in the very back corner of their large yard behind a tree. She got as far away from the house as was possible.
I would leave an honest factual review.
It’s worth checking https://www.airbnb.co.nz/help/article/1869 for clear guidelines. Including what you are allowed to ask.
They have broken AirBnB’s policy because the dog was unhousebroken, and was left alone at the listing without prior approval.
My read of it would be they were deliberately flouting the rules by saying it’s a service dog to be able to bring it. They lied.
This is what gets me the most, on the one hand these service animals don’t require any paperwork or certifications so hosts have to take the word of the guest but ultimately have to deal with the consequences of being forced to host regular pets.
True @muddy. There’s more to the story that wasn’t a big deal but that I’d definitely categorize as “weird.” Just weird people. But yes to your points! They left the cabin in good shape (even swept the fireplace) but they were careless and entitled and zero situational awareness. When I submitted the damage claim for the broken art work and melted coffee carafe, the guy said he’d pay for the carafe because (get this) he put the carafe on the gas stove burner and didn’t realize it was still hot?!? And he said there was no way he’d pay for the broken art work because it wasn’t secured properly to the wall. Seven years of the artwork hanging on the wall and no one has ever knocked it down and how does the wooden frame break and the canvas rip? Anyhow, someone with any amount of situational awareness would realize 1) I was caught leaving my dog for long periods 2) Was caught leaving pee pad and fake grass for my unattended dog 3) Was caught opening a lock box to access the furnace I wasn’t supposed to run and drained the solar batteries. Hum…perhaps all of these things could mean a bad review or issue with AirBnB so let me be contrite and diplomatic. Spoken like a true host and not a guest I suppose!
I don’t understand the furnace thing. Maybe you can help me understand. The furnace is used to heat the place, right? But you locked the thermostat so guests cannot just set whatever temperature in order to conserve energy.
So for some reason the guests broke open the thermostat control instead of contacting you to make sure whether the furnace was set up correctly in the case that they were cold at the time?
The way they decided to solve the problem was by destroying (parts of) your property which would only makes sense if it was a case of emergency, like a blizzard hit their location and they were about to freeze to death.
Very odd behavior and together with the other issues a sad testament that such guests are still something we have to deal with…
Reread her original post. She asks guests to use the propane wall heaters, not the furnace.
@Hosterer @muddy is correct. It is confusing but I have propane wall heaters for heat and I tell the guests to use the fireplace for ambience. I don’t specifically tell them not to use the furnace but now know I need to. I figured the lock box would be enough. It was 65F in the cabin (18C) inside while they were there and 75F/24C outside but much cooler at night. The annoying thing, which is a constant battle as a host, is the ever growing list of things not to do. Especially when a place is off grid. Do I really need to tell people not to use lighter fluid to start a fire in the fireplace or to not use a furnace thermostat with a lockbox cover, etc.? Well yes…apparently I do. To the people with common sense, the long list of “don’t” things must look ridiculous.
We have found that simply allowing any kind of access, or visual to something we don’t want guests to use or see will result in the same scenario that you unfortunately had.
For example, we had a Wi-Fi extender / mesh unit sitting in a corner under a table since this was the best place for it to allow a guest to have the best Wi-Fi. Of course one guest saw it and unplugged it. They didn’t even know what it was all they saw was something with a red light on it that they didn’t know about. Our solution was to put it in a locked closet that we had on that floor what they don’t see, they can’t destroy or make into a conspiracy.
Our solution to a thermostat issue like this was putting a thermostat by ecobee into our attic and putting the remote sensor that they sell with it in the living space. The sensor doesn’t have controls on it and it’s easily hidden. Once we did that we never had a guest complain about the temperature since they couldn’t walk up to a thermostat they think is ‘theirs’, see it’s settings and then of course try to change it. How many times have you seen a guest walk up to a thermostat and instead of turning it down two or 3° to make it more comfortable turn it down to 60 or up to 90?
The problem of guest entitlement and ignorance is always there. We found that putting an automatic door closer on the entrance door solved the problem of guests who decided that they needed the door open for that ‘fresh wonderful breeze’ that they thought they needed when in reality it just invited insects through it and made the house unsafe when they left and left the door wide open. Guests taking or misplacing chargers was solved by mounting a charger onto the wall. We had to literally chain a corkscrew to the wall too.
Sadly, guests are an unavoidable consequence of owning an Airbnb. We suffer them just like we suffer ants at a picnic or Karens in a Starbucks.