Older male Guest, puddles of urine around the toilet: How to review?

I’m pondering how to handle this issue - if at all - on the publicly viewed review and/or the private note to the guest.
He is in his mid 70s. This was his first Airbnb booking. He came alone for three days. After he left I picked up the scent of urine around the toilet while cleaning the bathroom. I usually use a blacklight when cleaning the space after guests leave in order to catch what can’t be seen by the eye. I fetched my blacklight and was dismayed to see rivulets of dried urine, following the groves made by the grout between tiles, had extended as far as three feet from the toilet. Urine had puddled and dried on the floor around the toilet, and had splashed at the back of the toilet at the tank and onto the wall behind.
Now my question to you readers: Do I mention any of this in his public review so future Hosts have a heads up to the issue? Or instead, do I bring it up to him privately so that he can attempt to be more careful with his “aim” or suggest he sit on the toilet when urinating? Or is it best to ignore it all? What wording would you suggest as the most tactful (I’m rather blunt by nature)?

I’m pretty blunt too and usually I’m the first to insist that hosts should write honest reviews for the sake of other hosts, but I sympathise with your dilemma here.

What I’m thinking is what benefit would the knowledge be to future hosts? That, after all, is why we leave reviews so that other hosts are aware of what the guest is like.

So if I knew that a forthcoming guests was a careless pisser (for want of a better phrase) how would that help me? It wouldn’t. The area around the loo and the loo itself is going to be thoroughly cleaned anyway. Regardless of whether the loo is dirty or clean, it still needs cleaning within an inch of its life so although the carelessness would annoy me, it wouldn’t really be helpful to know in advance.

Our apartments are self-contained though. Hosts who have a guesthouse-type arrangement, with more than one guest sharing the loo, might look at this differently so I hope they’ll chip in.

What was he like as a guest in general?

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This is a tough one. He might not even be able to physically control his aim any longer. I’m also a proponent of honest reviews and unemotionally stating things as fact but this veers into private information territory. So unless I thought it was the result of recklessness I wouldn’t mention it in the public part of the review. I would say something in the private part and I would deduct stars for cleanliness.

Maybe he could be encouraged to pee outside. (inside joke for regular readers)

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It’s not really your business if this man sits to urinate or makes a mess when he urinates. It doesn’t seem that he purposely covered your bathroom in piss and that would be the only reason to mention anything about a man and his urination. He’s old, this is normal for old guys to make more of a mess. There are lots of health issues that make urinating more difficult and more messy. It’s just what it is and I believe we have to take people as they are to a certain degree. As long as it isn’t on purpose (e.g. it wasn’t a malicious attempt to vandalize the bathroom), I think you have to let it go.

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Harsh! This guy already knows he’s falling apart and getting old, he doesn’t need to be embarassed by his airbnb host. I firmly believe that it is too personal to mention at all.

He likely also doesn’t see well and probably can’t get up and down to clean it up either. There’s also the factor that he’s probably never cleaned his own toilet, there’s likely a wife who’s always done it. He’s too old to re-train and it’s definitely out of the scope of a host.

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I was thinking that after I’d posted. Could it be that he was messy because of a temporary medical condition? (I know nothing about medical matters). If so, it would be a shame for him to have a review about the problem even when the whatever-it-is has cleared up.

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It could be because of a permanent medical condition. He’s an old man. With a 70 year old prostate, that is the reason. The flow is unpredictable at this point. There’s lot of reasons but I don’t think it’s right to humiliate him as it seems to be an accident or an oversight, not personal and not intentional.

As you said, it has to be completely cleaned anyways, so it doesn’t really matter.

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He was here to visit relatives for the Thanksgiving holiday. He left the space tidy and was quiet. We spoke and he was a pleasant man. I wondered if maybe he wasn’t aware of the urine issue in general and that a private, tactful, “heads up” might nudge him to address what his own bathroom floor was enduring. I saw this result first-hand after observing my now deceased older brother’s bathroom in which the floor around the toilet had rotted . . . Big sigh!

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I don’t have any way of knowing this. Speaking for myself, as I get older I hope people will be willing to tell me things like this and not assume that I am aware. But yeah, it’s probably best to just let it go (pun unintended). Eventually he’ll get the host who humiliates him in the review publically and then he’ll go back to using hotels. He could probably sit down and solve the problem.

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I agree with other commenters here. This is too personal to mention in a review. Nor would I say anything in the private comments. And I think I’d still give him five stars for cleanliness.

Like others, I’m confident that he can’t help it. I think mentioning it or giving him fewer cleanliness stars would be akin to rating a guest lower for some other disability, such as down-rating a guest who was deaf for poor communication.

It seems like compassion is the order of the day here.

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Which means it will only be more excruciatingly embarassing if you mention the urine to him. He obviously put effort into a being a good guest and wouldn’t want to know how disturbing his urine was to you.

I don’t believe this exists for this situation.

I treat a lot of my patients in their homes. This is almost always true for old men who live alone who can’t afford a housekeeper. I do actually train old men to start urinating sitting down, primarily for their safety but I am a professional and it’s in my scope of practice. I do not address it until I’ve developed some rapport with them and I address it as a professional and it’s a long, arduous process with lots of careful and practiced wording (and some well-played jokes to lighten the mood) to get these guys to sit down to urinate. It is a heavy psychological thing for them and can’t be done carelessly. Should your guest sit to urinate? Yes. Should you tell him that in his airbnb review? Absolutely not. If you do tell him, will he start sitting down to urinate? No, he won’t. He will stay at a hotel next time.

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Completely aside from the issue of this thread, one of my brother in laws told me back in the 80s that in the Navy they all sit down to pee because on the ships it’s hard to aim. They also had to clean the “heads” themselves and those toilets have to pass inspections. For them it wasn’t a psychological thing because they had to clean it up themselves. I’m a believer that as long as men had the little lady to clean up after them there was no need to give piss amiss a second thought. I’ve noticed as an Airbnb housekeeper that most of my male guests have very good aim and I suspect more of them are sitting now. Just another thing changing for the better as time goes by.

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Can only echo what other posters have said, definitely not one to mention either publicly or privately.

Other than just being a messy pisser, there are a multitude of reasons (his age being a factor) ranging from simply poor eye sight through to ailments that interfere with motor functions.

Saying that, if I can still piss standing up when I get to his age I’ll look at that as a bonus!

JF

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Of course, but this guest is clearly not one of those men. I’ve been working with old men for 30 years and if they aren’t already sitting to pee, it has to be approached in a certain way. Usually by the time I’m training someone as my patient, their families will report that they’ve been suggesting it “for years” and haven’t gotten anywhere with it and so am impressed with my success, but it takes a lot of care to convert them. It’s tied into their identities and everything. Many of them cry during the processs. It’s not as simple as it may seem and it is truly personal and out of the scope of an airbnb host.

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For those who have suggested that men might sit down to pee, I’ll mention something that my tall husband has said over and over. He is so tall that he can’t, sanitarily, sit down to pee. This is especially true if the toilet bowl is the small, round type. Sitting down, especially on those toilets, is disgusting to him. He can’t ensure that he won’t end up touching the toilet bowl. I hope that’s not too graphic, but it is an issue for tall men. It also influenced the decisions we made when we put in new toilets. They are all the elongated, oval-shaped toilet bowls. Just something to think about. My husband, by the way, is scrupulous about cleaning up after himself.

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RebeccaF -

I agree, “. . . compassion is the order of the day here.”
I’ll review him as a 5-Star Guest on all counts, and if he comes back to stay again I won’t be surprised to find the bathroom floor anointed again! I’ll head there to clean first before I strip the bed, etc.

Thanks all of you out there for your feedback, suggestions, analysis of the older male urinary tract issues, and so forth.

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His prostate is 70 years old. It’s falling apart. Guaranteed. They aren’t meant to last so long. You don’t have one, you’re in the clear ,)

I’ll defer to you as this is your area of expertise. I find it sad to think of the assumptions people are going to be making about me simply based on my age, for good or bad. No wonder so many of us quit going anywhere are we age.

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Having just returned from a visit to my in-laws (my father-in-law, 75, has advancing Parkinson’s), I can tell you that the ability to get up and down from a toilet, especially one not at a raised height for someone with mobility issues, is not something that can be assumed.

If the guy had the mobility to get down on the floor to clean up, I’m pretty sure he would have.

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Yeah, tough one. Both my father and my father-in-law do this, both don’t want to sit down because it’s hard work to get up again. Neither are aware of the messes they make.

I think @jaquo has it right when she said “how would that help me.” Basically, what you need is info from hosts on whether the info would help them. I.e. would future hosts decline a booking request from this guest if they knew, or would they be able to do something to prepare, etc.

I personally don’t think it would help me.

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