I am currently on my yearly trip to Canada to see my daughters and grandkids. My first stay is with my oldest daughter. The flight got in very late at night (in the wee hours of the morning, in fact), so there was no time to show me anything in their new home.
While this isn’t an str experience, I thought it might be interesting from a guest’s point of view for those hosts who have or think about getting a lot of “smart” features.
My daughter had told that in the morning, she and her husband had plans with friends and would be going out early, and not back til noon, and my 18 year old granddaughter had to go to work at 11. I slept until 11:15, as it had been a very long and exhausting travel day and I didn’t get to sleep until 3am.
On waking, alone in the house, I went to make a cup of coffee to find that they had a Jura coffee maker that I hadn’t a clue how to use. So I saw they had a French Press in the cupboard and went to boil a kettle of water, only to find out they had a convection stovetop which I also had no idea how to use. There was nothing intuitive about it- it said “locked” but there was no indication of how to unlock it. I looked through the cupboards for a conventional electric kettle, which they used to have in their old house, but there wasn’t one anywhere. My daughter was later getting home than she had planned, and as I have zero idea where a nearby coffee shop would be in her suburban neighborhood, I sat there for almost 2 hours, a headache coming on, unable to make a cup of coffee.
When my daughter got home, I told her I felt like I had been dropped on an alien planet where I would have to eat and drink cold or raw food forever because there was no possible way to figure out how to do something as simple as boil a pot of water.
I realize that hosts who have these modern, smart home appliances and devices would leave instructions for using them, and that some guests would already be familiar with these things themselves, but honestly, even when my daughter showed me how to use them, it was far more complicated than I would ever want to have to deal with reading about in an str rental before being able to have a cup of coffee in the morning.