Unfortunately I have had this experience, and it turned out terribly. The guests, coming from over six hours away had been told when they asked before booking what was my latest check in time that 11pm was the latest possible, as we are sleeping after then. They said they were hoping to go to a cocktail party in town by 9pm, and were just checking to see if they needed to check in first. As I heard nothing else for the rest of the week, I assumed everything was on track. But no. Day of, I get a message from the girlfriend, telling me that Joel hadn’t been able to get the day off, so would be working until 6pm. I expressed concern, telling her that even if they left straight away, there are always stops for gas etc, so I didn’t feel they would be here in a reasonable time. I offered to refund for the night so they could stay elsewhere - even though this was not my responsibility as they’d clearly lied and knew he didn’t have the day off. But they convinced me they would be straight on their way, and therefore I assumed an arrival around 12:30, which was a pain, but not necessarily worth the loss of income at that point. Would you believe, that at around 9pm, I get another message. We’re running really late, because Joel hadn’t packed his bags so he had to catch a bus home from work, then they had to leave, and now they were hungry and stopped for dinner. By this point I was raving mad, and let them know I was disappointed.
They flipped out on me, when I said they should find somewhere else. ‘We’re coming’.
They arrived around 2:30am, and had a surly attitude to boot, as if we should have stayed up all night for them and liked it. the next day, they performed some kind of acrobatics on the bed that caused it to collapse and gouge our floors (steel frame, still no idea how they achieved it). No problem they said, we’ll just stay in a different room tonight (apparently they didn’t mind that we’d now have two rooms to clean, and two sets of sheets).
When we came in to fix the bed for them, instead of moving their crap out of the way, we had to crawl across piles of inside out jeans, boots, underwear dropped right next do the bed as if they just peeled them off getting into it, and didn’t even care to move them out of the way so we could access the bed. It looked like pigs had taken over - claimed to be a doctor (woman) and journalist from Washington DC. When they left it was gross, huge pile of beard clippings in the basin, a last mark of his inability to see his hosts as more than servants there to meet his entitled jerky expectations. Ugh. I got angry remembering that.
Others have got here around midnight, and that’s fine, so long as they communicate. It’s all in the how and the why. To hear that this guy, knowing he wasn’t off work for the day hadn’t even packed so they could leave straight from work really shocked me. It was a true case of ‘no one matters except me’.