Hi folks,
I hope you are all doing well. India, like the gopher sticking its head outside its burrow and debating whether to come out, is wondering whether there are going to be six more weeks of the winter. I mean, the pandemic.
My listing is showing signs of limping back to life, but things could get shut down again if another wave of the pandemic returns.
The topic today is a European guest who came to stay for a month. He seemed like basically a nice chap, but on the whole was a problem guest. Iām really tempted to just not review him, because he definitely does not deserve my default all-positive review, and itās much easier just not to review than write a negative one. A non-review will also not elicit hostile reactions from the guest. My past negative reviews have never produced a reaction, but this guest seems a bit special.
However, perhaps he is enough of a problem that I should warn other hosts about him. Based on what I write below, feel free to offer your opinions.
It seems likely he wonāt review me, because (a) his approach to things seems to be not to concern himself with things that donāt directly affect him and (b) there is like a day and a half left in the review period.
When I initially accepted the booking, it was apparent that the guest spoke terrible English, though his written English was slightly better. I immediately thought this would be a problem in India, since the guest certainly didnāt speak any Indian language. Itās difficult enough in India, even if one does speak all the languages.
It wasnāt even the fact that the guest spoke terrible English. His approach to English conversation was to produce long-winded and almost incomprehensible sentences with bad pronunciation and much repetition, which was painful to listen to. I pointed out the language issue to him and his girlfriend, who did speak English, but he seemed to dismiss this as an issue. He basically said that he āwould manageā. Well, heās an adult, and itās not my business. But I did think that we would end up doing a certain amount of hand-holding above and beyond. International guests do tend to require a little extra help. I thought this one might require more. As it turned out, it wound up being more than I was expecting. It also seems likely (though I donāt know this for certain), that he doesnāt have much travel experience outside his home country.
So, some small notes about his visit. Some of it may seem trivial to third parties.
On a number of occasions, he attempted to contact me by standing in the entrance area of our flat and shouting my name. That area is not far from my room, and well within earshot, especially if someone is being loud, as he was. On at least one occasion I was sleeping, and it woke me up. I told him not to do that, because it was quite strange and inappropriate. I told him to message me, or call me if it was urgent or an emergency. After I told him a couple of times, he mostly stopped, though he would still sometimes do it.
He would randomly decide to have breakfast at a range of times, ranging from 11 am all the way till 3 pm. He didnāt seem to be aware that my cook didnāt just sit in the kitchen all day waiting for orders. Heād then message me asking for a 5 egg omelette. On at least one occasion, he communicated this to my cook using sign language.
Normally guests have breakfast when they get up, unless itās too late for them, and normally communicate with the cook directly, usually by just wandering into the kitchen. While this isnāt a big deal, itās definitely a bit unusual. And it wasnāt necessarily convenient for my cook to drop what he was doing and make an omelette, nor for me to communicate with my cook at odd moments.
As far as I can tell, he would leave the air conditioner on when he left the room. And lights as well. Whenever we went in to clean, the A/C was on.
(This one wound up being a bit more serious.) In India, food and especially sugar will attract bugs, particularly ants. There are small red ants that are quite common here (Iām not sure what their scientific name is). They bite, and can be quite a nuisance. Anyway, we noticed them after the guest had been there some time, and every time we cleaned the room, it got worse. Three times, we had to take the bed apart and lift the mattress off the frame, because they were in the bed. The second time it happened, which was around a week before the guest departed, I wrote him a detailed message about this, but never responded to this either in writing or verbally. and when we did a proper clean of the room again after we left, the room was completely covered with ants and we had to do a through clean, and wound up getting bitten by the ants too. But even this was not completely successful, because the next guest said she got bitten, so I called in pest control. In hindsight, I should probably have done that at the time we did the cleaning, but I didnāt realise they would come back so fast.
Iām not sure what the guest was doing that was causing this, but I think he was eating chocolate in the room, including the bed, and not cleaning up after himself. Also, possibly sugar cola drinks. And I think he ate food in there as well.
This is the worst pest problem Iāve had since I started hosting here in May 2016. Iāve occasionally had ant issues, because guests are often not as clean as one would like, but never anything like this. Of course, the fact that he was here a month no doubt exacerbated things.
The guest was getting married, so he wanted to buy some clothes for himself and his fiancee. Iāve occasionally helped with similar things before, so I got one of the people who works part time for me (Iāll call him S) to take him around and show him shops and so forth. This wound up being more work than anticipated, because the guest didnāt seem inclined to make up his mind easily, and wanted to shop around. And S kept being roped into this.
More problematic was that he also wanted to buy some jewellery. Iām still not sure whether this was his fiancee, or as a business thing. As mentioned, it was not easy to communicate with him. Anyway, this wound up being something of a nuisance in the last two weeks of his stay, and particularly the last week. Because he couldnāt decide what he wanted to buy, and was wandering around trying to negotiate quality and prices with different people. S got roped into this and to some extent I did too. Then he decided on something, but decided to have most of the money to pay for the thing sent from Europe by his fiancee. Eventually, it didnāt arrive before his departure, though of course everyone was hoping it would, but he had already partly paid the jeweller, who apparently wasnāt willing to give the money back. So in the last couple of days, we were in his room having conferences on the phone with his fiancee (who wasnāt in India), and the jeweller, trying to decide what to do. We didnāt spend a ton of time doing this, but it still went on for an hour or two every day, and was quite distracting. And I didnāt exactly volunteer for this. He sent me several messages asking for help.
But he wasnāt easy to deal with, nor cooperative, and it was hard to understand what he was saying at the best of times. I was trying to discuss with his fiancee about what to do, because she did actually speak English, but it didnāt go well.
After that, just before he left, he complained to me that nobody was listening to him, and that we were talking over him. I thought this was a bit rich, seeing as he was the one asking for help. And by the end he was almost treating us like his assistants, which felt quite weird.
I thought that since it seemed there was some delay in the money, and that he should wait a little longer for it to arrive. But he didnāt want to do that, and in the end, itās just as well he didnāt, because it seems there was an error in transmission, though I donāt understand how that was possible, and the money never did arrive.
Anyway, this struck both myself and S as a bit much for what was just supposed to be a rental stay, and between the ants and the jewellery shopping, we were quite relieved when he was gone. Though, like I said, he seemed basically like a nice guy.
Finally, the evening when he was leaving, we had this weird conversation. Where, first, as already described, he complained that we were ātalking over himā and that it was ānot comfortableā. I didnāt say much to this. I thought it better not to rile him up. So I said that I understood what he was saying and I was sorry. Iād already offered to call him a taxi at 1 am via the Uber app, so I told him to call me when he was ready to leave. Then he weirdly asked me why he should call me, and said that he was always on time, and that if he said he would be ready at 1 am he would be ready at 1 am. I didnāt know what to say to this so just shrugged.
Then at around 5 to 1, I went to check on him, and saw that heād taken his luggage and gone downstairs without saying anything to me. So I followed him. S was downstairs too, though Iād not told him to come. So I ordered him his taxi, waited till it came, made sure that the driver knew which terminal/gate he needed to be taken to, because I at least really didnāt want him to miss his flight and come back
here again.
Sorry, for the long winded stream of consciousness message. I could make it shorter, but that would be even more work. So, how about this as a possible review? Did I leave out anything important? Did I include or emphasize something trivial? Could my wording be improved?
*
xxx visited for a month during his trip to India.
He seemed like a nice person.
However, he was not sufficiently careful with cleanliness, and there was an ant infestation in the guest room during his stay. He did not respond to requests to be more careful. After he left, I had to call pest control to deal with the problem.
As far as I can tell, he did not bother to turn off the A/C when he left the room.
Prospective hosts should be aware that he does not speak English well, which may make communication challenging.
Also, he may prove a more demanding guest than average. In our case, we became involved in his personal shopping projects during his stay to an extent that did not really feel appropriate. However, he did not seem to be aware that his requirements exceeded a reasonable threshold, nor did he seem particularly appreciative of our efforts.
And the end of his stay he simply walked out of the building without making any attempt to communicate with me, even though he had asked him to order a ride for him on Uber (at 1 am).
Cleanliness 2/5, Communication 3/5, Observance of House Rules 2/5
