Our first 3rd party booking, and in this case, I'm all for it

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The first guest we’d ever hosted on Airbnb contacted me to ask if his parents, in their 80s, could stay at our apartment while their timber floors are being refinished. These guests were just lovely, so we said yes.

Son came with his parents to check in and Oh. My. Gosh. They were hilariously cranky. First, they couldn’t use the digital door lock to get in. Even though they had chosen their own numbers, they couldn’t enter them correctly, even after careful coaching. When they finally got in after 5 attempts, loudly opining that I should just have a key, they started marching around, visibly skeptical about everything. Peering into the bedroom – “Only one bedroom?” “Yes, sir, just one bedroom, as advertised.” “Hmm. No TV?” “The TV is on the bedroom wall, sir.” “Hmm.” Son muttered to me under his breath, “Don’t worry, Dad is a chronic complainer. He’ll settle in and be fine.” Parents had brought their own pillows and crocheted throws and immediately distributed these around the apartment. It looked like a different apartment in just 5 minutes.

Then I tried to explain how some things worked, and they just stared at me looking blank/confused. I really couldn’t tell if they were absorbing anything I said or ruminating over the fact that there was only one bedroom and no physical key. The parents kept speaking to their son in Greek, and son kept insistently responding in English (for my sake), and after a while of this, he says to his father, very patiently, “Okay Dad, I’m going to go downstairs and pay Lisa and then when I come back up we can discuss all the things that I forgot.” LOL.

I am just SO GLAD that it’s the son who booked, because if this older couple were our official guests? I’m pretty sure they would TANK our rating. (If they could even figure out how to rate me.). And since son is effectively managing their stay, I don’t have to deal with their questions about how everything works. Never thought I’d say this, but in this case, a third party booking is a huge relief.

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haha, I can relate! you know about Greek families? you are lucky the son is your liaison, he is the Golden Child, so you’ll be fine, and sounds like he’s your lifeline to Sane People. and your place is super lovely, in gorgeous Manly, so beyond them being typical complainers, it will be fine.

just had a lovely boomer couple stay 2 nights. they booked last minute, first time users, and had SO much drama with the app. the guest ended up calling CS in the Philippines… you can imagine what she thought of that experience. When they finally arrived (somehow they managed to screw up and went some extra long way) they were so frazzled and she said “I’m never booking through this terrible company again!”. i took her phone to see what the issue was and fair enough, the booking was NOT there, so of course she was stressed. (I think there must be a lag time with a same day booking?), and then she said she thought she’d booked for 2 nights, not one (total booking was $280 for the one night, incl pet fee, so sure it’s a bit pricey, but for 2 nights… uh, rather cheap!). She reminded me of my mum so I just made soothing comments about having a cup of tea, running the bath and enjoying the cosy fire. they ended up booking the 2nd (directly, with a nice discount from me), and then today when they left I said “well at least the freeway is easy to find” and turns out they were going to do some longwinded way to get to the freeway, they had a digital GPS device in the car but it was rubbish. They were very nice but sadly just not quite all there any more - like my own folks, almost at Joe Biden… I did comment to my hubby that we GenX might laugh and say how crap we are at new tech, rather than blame the tech, and we must remember to always do this. There’s nothing wrong with the ABB app (I might have many complaints about how abb treats hosts, and the limited resources they devote to us, but the app for guests is very good)

Because they are newbies and she was so anxious, I’m hoping she doesn’t leave a review, cos I’m sure she’ll take out her travel angst on me, even though I’m pretty sure the stay was wonderful, and she even mentioned that having the dog was big challenge to finding accomm, and she raved about the local area, the food, the scenics etc. I will leave her a nice review though, so her account has 1 5* review, but i’ll do it on day 14 so she doesn’t reciprocate.

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What an old soul in this young son.

Yes, the exception proves the rule.

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I have a friend who is an award winning Ph.D. scientist, 60 years old and more tech savvy than 98% of the world population. She also has ditzy moments, refuses to use GPS, gives directions that aren’t as reliable as GPS, and is very stubborn about anything once she makes up her mind whether its veganism or the multiparty system of New Zealand.

Unfortunately she had a bad experience in China with Airbnb. She was trying to book a place in Berlin and she could not get her ID verified in order to complete creating her account. She called them. She offered all kinds of verification to who she was including directing them to her website profile at the university where she was working. But somewhere along the line she couldn’t or wouldn’t provide whatever it was they wanted. As a consequence she refuses to use Airbnb. The punchline is that her husband has to book for her. Same if she wants to check Facebook, she just has someone else do it or has her husband create a temporary dummy account. She usually blames the other thing, not herself, regardless of the source of the issue. Sometimes the problem isn’t age, it’s personality.

One of the old problems was if you sent a money request via the resolution center, guests couldn’t find it. A guest needing to pay his pet fee showed me on his app how there was no record of it. Once I started messaging them the direct link, the problem was solved.

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She sounds like quite a character!

I wouldn’t want to get on her wrong side.

[I always hate it when people you like dislike you…]

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