Poll: Welcome Gifts (or the lack thereof)

Don’t know if you are too busy to do so, but some hosts with similar situations who hate to create more plastic waste leave a plastic tote outside the guest door where the guests place dirty dishes which the host removes and washes each day, replacing them with clean ones.
Really only takes a few minutes to grab the tote, leaving clean stuff at the same time, as hosts just add the guest dishes to their own dishwasher load.

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They get this note via text the day before arrival:
About food: Tiny Tiki is self catering, but we offer some breakfast materials in the hideaway: eggs butter pancake mix syrup coffee tea cream, olive oil vinegar spices and condiments, also pasta and sauce. Cook could supplement those things. Also chilling gallon of Crystal Geyser H2o these items are free :heart_eyes:
They also get a cheap bottle of white vino, but I don’t tell them about that.

They love it! but usually most things are untouched.

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We leave a bottle of wine from a local vineyard and a snack, pretzels or cookies. It seems to be well received

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My guests are all LT, so basically we are roommates. I don’t do anything specific, though sometimes I do share things, as you would with a roommate, like when I bake a pie, make jam, or place flowers on the kitchen table. I share because we live together, not because they are “a guest.” My current guest, whose stay is now beginning year 3, may be my last guest for a while when he leaves in December. Of course that depends on whether or not his contract is extended, again. I’ve been doing Airbnb since 2014 sharing up to 3 rooms in my home. I won’t be lonely, but I will miss seeing people of different cultures from around the world who find themselves meeting in my place and having a wonderful time together. I won’t miss the selfish, inconsiderate and entitled ones. Uh ya… it might be time for a break.

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I really like the way you stated that. I am also a homeshare host, and while I don’t do long term, many of my guests book for 10 days to 2 weeks, so with the ones who are sociable and hang out quite a bit, they do feel like temporary roommates. I’ll often buy a bottle of wine and we’ll share it in the evening, and next night they’ll come home with a bottle. I or they will often say, “I’m making some XX for dinner, would you like to have dinner with me, they’ll be plenty”. One guest, who only stayed for maybe 4 nights and who loved to cook, said she found it hard to cook for one, and insisted I share all the meals she cooked, which were great.

I’ve also taken guests to local beaches they would never know about as tourists, sometimes we’ve gone out for lunch or dinner together, or walk through town and I’ll point out good places to shop for food or gifts.

I stopped hosting for 2 years during the pandemic, but really missed it, and meeting cool people from far flung places, but had my first post-Covid guest in May, and hope to get lots more guests this season. (Summer isn’t hosting season where I live in Mexico- too hot and humid, and I go up to Canada for a month or more then anyway).

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I didn’t realize how much we missed the international guests until we resumed after COVID. That said, we all need a break sometimes.

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Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be an option for me, as the Guest Suite door is outside and we have lots of feral cats that could get into the tote or sit on the tote, etc. I do love the idea though–would be perfect if there was a hall between my part of the home and the Guest Suite :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Hey, the cats will do the prelim cleaning of the dishes- there won’t be any food bits left and with those rough tongues licking them clean, all the dishes would need is a quick rinse. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Seriously, though, that’s exactly what my friend who used the tote system had- a hallway between the guest suite and her half of the downstairs.

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@muddy Feline soap–I love it :rofl: