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I notice that the problem has apparently solved itself in that the guest sort of acquiesced to the fact that they didn’t miss the item until that evening.(?)
While I wasn’t going to offer a solid solution or answer, I was going to tell you that something similar happened in my rental. A guest from Canada or Australia (can’t remember which but it was definitely one of the two) wrote and said he was missing his new watch and believed he might have left it in the unit. Of course, I immediately called the housecleaner who has been with me since day one, over six years ago, and asked her if she came across it. She said definitely not and she cleaned every inch of the place. Like your cleaner, she has always reported everything a guest has left (chargers, clothes, a private journal/diary, etc.).
She suggested that maybe it had fallen in the taxi that he and his wife took to the airport or perhaps he left it in one of those plastic bins when going through the security checkpoint. I quickly wrote him and suggested those possibilities. Apparently one of the two scenarios must have struck a chord because his reply was a bit sheepish and he thanked me for getting back to him so promptly. I don’t know whether he located his watch in a pocket or what, but there was no follow-up blame game.
Thanks for the thoughts. It’s obviously difficult to know how a stranger will react, but I don’t see how one can be responsible, or guard against, items that a guest may or may not have left in the room. I don’t think I’ll suggest they might not have left it here, or anything like that. It’s redundant at best, and could possibly be considered offensive.
I’m truly gobsmacked by some of the replies on this thread from last year. Seriously, it basically reads:
oh just lie and tell her you didn’t find it.
stupid guest, it’s her own fault for not checking
I can’t be arsed to do it
And the classic double standard - a hotel wouldn’t do it. Why is it ok to compare an Airbnb to a hotel in these cases and at the same time routinely complain that guests “don’t understand that we’re not hotels”?
@faheem – “I don’t think I’ll suggest they might not have left it here, or anything like that. It’s redundant at best, and could possibly be considered offensive.”
It’s hypothetical, obviously. I have no idea what someone might think if I offered such suggestions. “Check your pockets; maybe it’s in there.”
No criticism intended if you or anyone else approaches this differently. Everyone has their own style, and this sort of situation doesn’t have a winning approach.
It’s just one person. And I’ve not any problems with any of my personal stuff going missing. Or anyone else’s stuff here. And I have a fair amount of electronic equipment, though maybe not by Western standards. And she’s worked for us for years. We did have some cleaning supplies go unaccountably missing recently, but that wasn’t in the guest room, but in the kitchen. And some newly purchased shower gel disappeared. But we have another temporary employee at the moment, and she seems a little dodgy. Though I hate to point fingers without proof.
This is why I like to have total responsibility for our rental and for the others that I co-host. I do the cleaning myself for several reasons. The first is that my ‘real job’ involves sitting at a computer all day long and cleaning the rentals - though not a lot of fun - is fantastic exercise and cheaper than going to a gym.
I trust no cleaner to do the work to Airbnb standards - would they really vacuum under all the furniture after every guest? I doubt it. Would they take immediate photographs of excessive cleaning / damage? Would they thoroughly clean the fridge or the blinds or the patio? Would they make sure that the AC was turned to an acceptable level, check that all the lights are working and that the wifi is functioning okay? Plus many more details too.
But @Magwitch raises an important point - I honestly don’t think that I could find cleaners in our area that are thorough, detail oriented and 100% honest.
One thing that I’ve learned from Airbnb guests is that domestic help is affordable for the middle class in other countries. We had a guest who was from South Africa and lived in Indonesia. She told me than in both countries anyone who made a reasonably decent income could afford housekeepers and cooks. She was surprised that in the U.S. only the wealthy employ a full household staff.
We’ll this is a bit strong. I don’t feel shame because I’m not eager to go to a bunch of trouble to send something back to someone who has been careless and didn’t check their room carefully enough when leaving.
If the guest will send a delivery service with a prepaid envelope to my house to collect it, I will be happy to send it back. Otherwise, I’m afraid they are out of luck.
As a former manager of a friend’s beach house here, I spent way too many hours of my life looking for lost items, packing them up and waiting in line to mail them back. When you live in a rural place, that’s like a half a day gone.
Look around carefully for your items, I can’t mail anything back.
It depends on the brand and model. Some with the Sonic name are $36 but the Phillips Sonicare is $200. Before you reimburse please get a receipt or some verification which model it was.
I don’t think I really have the time and energy to do the cleaning on top of everything else I have to do. And it’s not the sort of thing I’m good at, at least in the long term. I have terrible problems with attention span, especially when I’m doing boring repetitive tasks. And I’m pretty inefficient at this sort of thing.
I don’t think our cleaning person is a great cleaner. She’s not exactly super-detail oriented. And she thinks that light switches will electrocute her, so she doesn’t clean them properly. Things like that. So I have to keep an eye on that. But for now, at least, her cleaning seems to be passing muster.
Thanks for addressing the issue. Since you aren’t a newbie, presumably you mean that you think a newbie would prefer to read several theads on the same topic.
I just thought that it made sense to have related issues on the same thead. But perhaps judicious use of tags would be sufficient to tie multiple threads together, Perhaps a tag like ‘left-items’? Other opinions?
I only said “newbie” as those are more likely to be the people searching for the topics. But regardless if someone is a newbie or not - I personally prefer to read a new story in a separate thread. It gets confusing with replies too. It’s not always clear who is replying to who, and it can be a lot to wade through. And then new people start reading the thread from the very beginning and replying to very old posts. So that gets jumbled in with the new story and people replying to that. And of course we have our regular off topic posts that are always mixed in too.
It just gets to be a lot to have so much info in a single thread.
I agree. Someone read through all the old posts and called some people shameful, some of whom don’t even post here anymore. So I would agree, let’s not resurrect old threads if possible. It’s easy enough to split it and start a new thread.
Ok, if you and @cabinhost agree, that’s probably as close to an “official” opinion as I am going to get here, since this site doesn’t have the equivalent of Stack Exchange’s Meta, which is where one goes to discuss policy issues. Here, for example, is the Meta site for U&L Stack Exchange. (It’s not as boring as it sounds.)
BTW @konacoconutz, when you split followups to my post into a new thread, you didn’t get all the relevant posts.
Oh, and so do I get to add/create new tags when I feel like it? Any objections?
But definitely don’t take the new thread opinion literally. I mean…if it makes more sense to resurrect an old one just to make a simple comment, then that’s okay too.
But I would say if someone wants to get advice on a current issue they are experiencing…probably best to begin a new thread.
Ah sorry, I should have added a winking smiley to show that I wasn’t completely serious. Yes, if you live in a remote rural place it’s a big difference in time and effort compared to urban settings where you can simply pay and print off the postage online and put it in the local postbox.
Also, I guess it depends on how important the item is. I left some earrings in a rental once (not airbnb), they weren’t valuable in monetary terms but had huge sentimental value to me. I begged the owner to send them to me offering to pay basically whatever she asked but no joy
