Odd situation, seeking advice

Introduction
28

Yes, exactly.

My youngest daughter runs her own licensed Montessori pre-school. Not only does she teach 8 children 5 days a week, she cleans the facility herself, has to file reports with the Montessori association, communicate with the parents. When she’s not at school, she is doing lesson planning in the evenings and weekends, her bookkeeping, has her own 3 year old to look after, and of course her normal housework. A couple of times this winter and last, she had to spend 45 minutes digging her car out of the snow before leaving for work. Her husband works out of town a lot, so she often has no help with anything. She also was in her late 30s when my granddaughter was born, so she isn’t some 20 year old with boundless energy.

She is always complaining about how tired she is. Would that excuse her from getting an str booking date wrong, not once, but twice? I don’t think so.

29

Wow…let’s wind back here! I think in this forum we are really asking - what would fellow hosts do in my position? Sometimes trying to discern between what is an accurate gut feeling and what is an inexperienced airbnb user is challenging. Acting on your gut is important so I try to ask a few more questions. Requesting to book outside the platform can be a red flag but with a repeat booking considering they are paying another 30%-35% on top of what you’re getting, it’s not surprising they give it a try - but “no” is easy. But the rest of the craziness (why would she turn around and go home if she was coming to work where you live?); saying the app wouldn’t let her book for 2 nights, arriving on the wrong day - that kind of thing is certainly cause for concern. I would write her and say you are open to hosting her if she wants to pre-book the dates through airbnb but that all the date confusion is very concerning to you and that you are needing to ascertain if there is any risk to hosting her. I find that if I have doubts more communication (and being respectfully direct) can quickly shed light on whether this is a comfortable enough situation.

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30

To circle back on this, everything turned out fine. She stayed my place and was a great guest. I’m having her back for another visit. It all ended well…

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31

That’s great! But, what was with her odd challenge with dates? Did it come up?

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32

That’s a great question. It did come up and she said she was just really tired. I’m going to accept that. She didn’t appear to have any obvious drug problems or something? And to be honest as long as she pays and obeys the rules, it’s not my job to try to figure out why a person would be so confused about dates. I was just worried she was trying to scam me somehow. Since she wanted to go outside the app initially

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33

The host said the guest lived an hour away, but had a gig at the local hospital. The guest was likely trying to avoid having a 2 hr. commute to work and back, would be my guess. I could easily see doing that if I were a nurse working 12 hr. shifts.

34

The trouble with people is - and there’s a grandiose start to a sentence if ever there was one - that we all think we’re perfectly normal and anyone who acts differently is odd or weird or strange.

I think I’m perfectly normal but other people might think I’m off-the-scale nuts and vice versa.

So when our guests do strange things that we wouldn’t do such as mixing up dates, asking for receipts, moving all the furniture around and all that odd behaviour that we find so bizarre, it all seems perfectly normal to them.

:crazy_face:

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