According to that hotel i was an early check in…lol. What is early checking according to you?
If your check out time is 11 AM then early check in would be anytime after 11 AM
If someone wants to check in at 8 AM, it is an extra day from my perspective since 8 AM is before the check out time of the previous night.
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An hour is early check in, 8 hours is book the day before.
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Unless a hotel has no vacancy, they would have some empty rooms that had already been cleaned available. Hotels have cleaners on staff, there working all day.
You can’t compare how a hotel runs its business to an Airbnb. Checking into an Airbnb at 7am, amounts to an extra night.
Even hosts like me, who leave a night prep time blocked, would not consider a 7 am check-in to be anything other than the guest needing to book the previous night. If one of my guests checks out at 3pm (I have a 4pm check out specifically because it suits my market and I have 1 day prep time), I wouldn’t clean that room until the following morning. At this point, because of Covid concerns- I’m not going in there immediately after a guest vacates. So I would clean the room the following morning, and sorry, I’m not getting up at 5 am to clean for a 7am check-in.
The only two times I accommodated an early check in was when a guest said her bus was arriving in town at 9am , but she knew that was prior to my 11am check-in, so she’d just find a cafe to hang out in until 11. As she was so respectful, I said no problem, she could check in when she got into town. The other was a guest whose flight had had engine trouble shortly after take-off and turned around. The airline rebooked all passengers on a red-eye, so she was arriving in my town at 8 am. She had totally kept me in the loop about her changed arrival time, so no problem accommodating her, as she was actually supposed to arrive the previous afternoon. I hate getting up early, but I did in that case.
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Some of our bookings are min 3 days, and we turnover the same day. So if the first guy doesn’t leave until the 10am checkout time it’s likely we won’t be able to give them more than an hour earlier than the 3pm checkin time.
However, during high season our minimum booking is one month. If you book the month of Feb you can usually check in anytime Feb 1st. You do have to be out the last day of Feb by 10am. The cleaners do a ton of houses that day, and can’t schedule around stragglers. It is seldom a problem, more likely folks leave a day early to get home for the 1st of the month.
Noone is obligated to accommodate anyone with early check ins…I was saying IF room is avaliable then why not. Especially for hotels. For Airbnb hosts with private room in their own house is different as there is a person in a house for extra hours.
My point was that there is nothing wrong with asking.
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Book the day before even if hotels don’t ask for it? O ok…good to know:)
Makes sense…but hotel offered to me to pay 20$ extra to check in at 7 am. They even let me have breakfast at no charge that morning. Though I didn’t even ask for it.
Actually, there is something wrong with asking for an extremely early check in. It shows the host you either don’t understand the difference between a hotel and their property, are trying to avoid paying for another night as a sneaky way to get a discount, or are completely clueless and don’t understand what a check in time means. All of those are red flags to hosts and are reasons they might cancel on an IB or turn down a reservation request.
This is the way to do it. If you are arriving early, simply let the host know and ask what you can do until check in time. If they can accommodate an extra-early check in time, they may offer it up, with or without a fee.
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Yes, it is good to know the difference between a hotel with many rooms and an airbnb which is usually a single room or house. This is the challenge with Airbnb. Hosts can set their own policies and they aren’t as uniform as hotel’s policies across brands.
If I were going to ask an Airbnb host about early check in I would only do so with an offer to pay extra up front. Something like “My flight arrives at 8 am. Is early check in available? If so, what is the fee?” I also would only ask after reading every line, every policy, every rule in the listing to make sure the host hasn’t already answered that question in their ad. The very last thing I would ever do to a host is say “Hotels blah, blah, blah.”
That said, both hosts and guests have an annoying tendency to compare to hotels when it supports their point and ignore what hotels do when it’s not what they want to do.
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The passive-aggressive “we will be arriving early during they day (date) and checking out midday (date)” also is a red flag. No, it is not ok to ‘drop hints’ like that to hosts who already are sensitive to the problems that guests turn into poor star ratings because they do not get what they perceive to be their right.
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Whenever a guest has an unusual request, I make a decision based on how much it costs me. My decision has nothing to do with what’s ‘fair’ or ‘normal’. My answer just comes down to yes, no, or it’ll cost you extra.
Early check in is one of those things. It costs me nothing. My minimum stay is 6 nights, so a few extra hours is insignificant. I’m effectively giving a discount, and not a particularly big one. The place is always ready the night before.
I can see that someone hosting shorter stays would have a different answer— the ‘discount’ is a lot bigger when it’s tacked on to a one night stay. In that case, the host can go ahead and say no. But I wish they’d quit telling me what I should be doing.
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Agreed. If they want any of the things that are not in the listing (e.g. early check-in), they need to send an inquiry before booking. And I will promptly deny their inquiry in that case.
But the veiled demands for early check in and late check out are not ok after the booking is confirmed. I write up such guests during the review (just the factual behavior) and I take down the stars in the house rules rating.
If someone wants hotel-like flexibility and services, why book an Airbnb?
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From posts I have read over the years re guests asking for early check-in, it almost seems like a lot of them just do it to give themselves a lot of leeway in their travel planning, rather than them needing it for some legitimate reason, as it seems many guests who ask for it, even when it is granted, don’t end up arriving early anyway. They show up not at the early check-in time of noon that they asked for, but even past the check-in window.
I find it weird for a guest to just ask for early check-in without an explanation. Seems like hosts would be more willing to accommodate an early check in, if possible, if a guest explained that their flight gets in at 10am, it’s an 8 hr. flight, and they have 3 kids in tow, than if the guest just asks, “Can we have an early check-in at 11am?”
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Yes, I have experienced this many times. It’s annoying as heck, because the house is huge and there’s no way to get it ready early on a back to back booking unless the departing guests were super neat and left before the check out time.
People don’t realize how badly they stress out hosts when they ask for an early check in or late check out. I have no problem asking a hotel for a early check in or late check out, but I would never ask an AirBnB host for one!
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Hosts who do things like give refunds or allow early and late check out at no extra charge make it harder for hosts who can’t or won’t offer those things. I understand why some hosts don’t like it. But I do what feels right to me and what I feel is best for my business.
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We all do. And having people tell us that our policies or amenities are somehow wrong when we are doing all we can for our airbnb business makes me uncomfortable. Airbnbs are all very unique in many ways. When I see guests complaining that the specific airbnb they booked does not ‘conform’ to their imaginative expectations my anger rises, as I realize that someday a Karen/Ken will visit me and complain and downgrade our airbnb based on the guests’ specificity. No, we do not grant access to our stove - do not complain about something mentioned 3x in our listing…
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Yes. And I’ve had people tell me 100 times that I shouldn’t give refunds. What it boils down to is that they don’t want me to give refunds because they don’t.
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I was not comparing even a bit hotels to airbnb…I said I don’t understand the early check in charge…in hotels. For me it’s just another way of making extra for nothing .
That’s why I prefer by much hotels as I don’t have to make so much effort to just book it instead of reading all the rules and then end up with an upset host whom I can’t ask an innocent question.
You read but most guest don’t read anything. My experience at least.
definitely… hotels are a better fit for many trips.