Reasons to think twice about your "seen" notification settings on ABB messages!

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I had quite an adventure with our last guests, and it reminded me of a discussion we recently had here about the “seen” notifications in the ABB message system!

I’m going to give you the whole dirty details: The last full day of our guests’ stay, I got two texts: the first said, “Sorry to bug you, the toilet is a little clogged and your toilets are different than ours. Is there any secret to it?” But I’d been on the phone when that message came in and my phone doesn’t ding with text notifications if I’m on the phone, so I didn’t realised I’d missed their message until, 15 minutes after the first message arrived, another message came in saying “It just overflowed, help!”

I know this sounds like extraneous detail with the 15 minutes in between messages, but it becomes important and I’ll return to that momentarily.

So after I get the second message I respond, apologising profusely for what they’re going through, and I tell them I’m calling an emergency plumber and coming out there to clean up for them.

When I arrive, I found SHIT EVERYWHERE in the bathroom. I’ll spare y’all the photo but dear lord it was literally the most disgusting bathroom mess I have ever seen in my life.

It turns out the plumbing for the whole building had backed up (the plumber called it the “stack” for those of you who speak plumberese) and since our apartment is the closest to the outgoing sewage pipes for the whole building, it backed up into our toilet. I spent hours cleaning and disinfecting while the guests went on a walk and the plumber fixed the underlying situation. By the time I left, that place smelled like roses. Actually, no, it smelled like lemon and eucalypt disinfectant, but you get the idea. It smelled great.

Okay so now finally we get to the “seen” notifications. Remember that 15 minutes in between their two texts? Well, I hadn’t seen the first text, but even if I had, it wouldn’t have shown, because I turned off the “seen” notifications on advice from someone here on this forum. However, my husband and co-host hadn’t turned that off. And so while we were chatting, the guest commented to me, “You know, I could see that David saw my first text but he didn’t even respond!” Clearly, it perplexed / frustrated them, and he was politely, gently probing to find out what the heck was wrong with David.

Now, I knew why David hadn’t responded: he was in stressful all-day work meetings, and he knew my workday was less structured that day and I would be able to deal with the message. He probably just sneaked a surreptitious glance at his phone during the meeting, thought, “Yikes! Good thing Lisa will deal with that!” But meanwhile, the guest saw the “seen” notification and was thinking, “You know we’re having a plumbing emergency and you can’t even respond to my text after reading it?”

I apologised profusely and explained David’s work situation. And then as soon as I got home, I helped David change his settings so they don’t show when a message has been seen!

Just to be clear, I am really prompt and responsive in dealing with messages. But this situation did drive home for me that can be really anxiety producing when people are informed that you have seen a message but haven’t immediately responded. Especially when shit is exploding from the toilet O_O

The funny thing is, when I was chatting with the guests before they left on their walk, they mentioned the ABB rating guide I’d stuck at the end of my guide book after seeing @gillian post about it. (It’s that one that has an interpretation of each star rating: “1-star: Terrible. 2-stars: Terrible. 3-stars: Terrible. 4-stars: Terrible. 5-stars: Great!” and then explains the weird ABB rating system.) They cheerfully said, “Don’t worry, we’ll still give you a 5-star review!” I was thinking to myself, wow, I really wouldn’t deserve it, because nobody should have to deal with this during their holiday, even indirectly. So I refunded them $100 to say sorry for that, and phew, they did give us 5 stars and didn’t even mention the plumbing disaster!

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Sorry you had to deal with that disgusting mess. Good heads up on the seen messages.

I don’t think the scenario meant you didn’t deserve 5* s. Reasonable people don’t fault others for things that are out of their control. You’re just lucky that you had reasonable guests who understand things like that.

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good story, and sorry to hear about that situation.

i didn’t even realize i could turn off the “seen” stuff so i have been making a point not to look at notifications unless I have the time immediately to address a concern, this is very helpful to know.

a lot of guests are cool and its nice to have them, it is unfortunate that many will take advantage, understanding that they can use the threat of a bad rating to demand refunds etc. I have had two instances of this, and it really sucks when something out of your control gets used against you to extract full refunds with the threat looming of a 1 star review and a bad description.

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The stack is the 4" or larger pipe that the toilets connect to. It runs from where it connects to the sewer line, up the height of the walls and vents out on the roof. When you flush, everything goes down the stack, while the gases go up. Without that venting, sewer gases would be present inside all the time.

The hundred year old house I had in Canada had the stack running up from the downstairs bathroom right through my bedroom above it. Nowadays PVC piping is used, and the stack is inside the walls, but back then it was iron pipe.

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You speak plumberese! :smile: Thanks for the explanation

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Yes I learned how to do it from one of these threads, but i can’t remember where I saw it now. To be fair, @muddy made the point back then that there’s no reason to not let them see when you’ve read something if you’re a prompt responder, so there would probably be no harm in me having read receipts turned on. But my husband should not under any circumstances have that setting enabled!

Go to account → privacy and sharing → select the tab “sharing” → toggle on or off the “read receipts” setting.

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By the way, I should have made the original subtext of my post more clear, which is a big THANK YOU to this forum for existing, and for all the people who thoughtfully share their tricks and tips and advice, because when I had an awful situation come up, I knew just what to do to manage it in a way that it didn’t damage my rating, including:

  • how to send a guest money (which someone here taught me) and
  • when it’s appropriate to offer a partial refund when a guest has a bad experience;
  • how to write a guidebook that uses humour to educate people about the Airbnb rating standards
  • how to turn off the “read receipts”

And so many other things I’ve learned here!

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That’s only because of that vent stack that went through my bedroom in my Canadian house, and I also saw what my plumber did when he put in the plumbing in my house I had built from scratch here in Mexico.

Actually, most Mexican plumbers (mine was an American friend) do not use or understand vent stacks. What they do instead is put a vent pipe on the septic tank itself. If there is no septic tank and the place is connected to city sewer lines, the bathrooms always stink like sewer, because the system isn’t vented.

There’s a lot of funky plumbing and wiring in Mexico. A friend was complaining about a strong sewer smell coming up from her shower drain. I said that her builder had probably not used a trap on the shower drain and plumbed it directly into the pipe running from the toilet out to the septic. She said, “Oh, he wouldn’t have done that”. I said “Wanna bet?”

So the next time she needed to take a dump, she first removed the shower drain grate, then flushed the toilet and ran to look in the shower drain. Sure enough, there were her turds floating by.

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Oh dear, hahaha I’m laugh-crying. And after a bathroom has been plumbed and tiled, I imagine fixing this would be a huge and expensive hassle!

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