Should a host reply in messaging to a guest they rated poorly?

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I had a guest stay, and they disobeyed my rule, house rule, and paperwork left in my kitchenette, and on the bedroom bed, saying no food or drink outside of the kitchen. This guest came in twice with fast food, And ate in their room. They also misled us when, asking how old they were, told us they were over 25.

The guest sent a private message, asking why they got the bad review; thoughts on replying privately? On one hand, the review is self-sufficient, and I don’t feel I need to reiterate. On the other hand, is it worthwhile to educate this guest? It is possible they could be a model guest in the future, or it is possible they would stay again and trash me lol.

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Not your job. We’re hosts, not educators and we have enough to do.

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I look at the issue as “are you prepared to stand behind your review, if challenged.”

My own inclination – not that I am recommending this to you or anyone else – is to answer him on the platform and explain:

“…. reviews are a way that hosts communicate with other hosts and with Airbnb. A host review can confirm that excellent guests are indeed excellent. When guests fall short of five-star excellence hosts can use reviews to warn to other hosts about guests who – for example – disregard well-publicized house rules. I have an obligation to other hosts to be honest when I write a review.”

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Did you not state in the written review why the guest’s behavior was objectionable? If so, I can’t understand why the guest would ask why they got a bad review.

But aside from that, I don’t see anything wrong with responding privately to a guest’s private message, unless their message was rude, threatening, or profane.

And I do think it is possible for a guest to become a better guest in the future, even if they broke house rules, as long as they are open to honest feedback.

I just had a guest who couldn’t remember from one day to the next how I ask guests to do things. She asked me three days in a row what to do with empty cans and bottles, threw recyclables in the trash, even when I had told her that plastic and metal gets recycled, and had food in her room and food wrappers in the bedroom garbage (when I had cautioned her not to, that it would attract ants, which it did).
But she was 75 years old, and was well aware that she had cognitive issues- she mentioned how distressing her short term memory loss was to her, and said things like “I know I probably asked this before, but I can’t remember…”. I’m certainly not going to give her a review that says she ignored house rules- she was a very nice person who was trying her best but had memory limitations.

But while your guest might have taken “house rules” as merely a suggestion, and eating in their room might have seemed to them to be no big deal as long as they didn’t leave any food mess, and is in a different category from an elderly guest with memory loss (so mention of them ignoring house rules in the review is fair), this guest leading you to think they were over 25 (although I don’t know how that was done) is in a different category (purposeful deception) than ignoring a house rule, IMO.

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Poor lady. I’m so pleased @muddy that you were able to give her the benefit of the doubt. Many hosts wouldn’t have been so understanding.

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It gets sadder. She messaged me the evening of the day she checked out, saying she had lost her phone somewhere between my place (I drove her to the bus station to catch a bus to the airport) and the next place she flew to.

Her daughter in the US has the ability to track her mom’s phone, and sent me a screenshot of the last place it tracked to, which was my house, but it had last registered 8 hrs previous, which is when we left here for the station.

I remember she had her phone in her hand at the kitchen table just before we left, and didn’t go back into her room, but I searched the room, around the table, and in my car and no phone. I suspect she dropped it or it fell out of her bag when she was getting in my car, out on the road, and someone walking by picked it up.

She also got totally lost trying to walk back to my house from town her first day here, despite the fact that she had my hand-drawn map (which is really clear), a Google location pin map and a town street map.

I tend to think that her days of travelling alone, which she said she has done for years, may be not such a good idea going forward.

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That’s so sad. As we get older (for me, anyway) the idea of losing one’s independence such as travelling alone gets pretty frightening.

That being said, at 75 I don’t consider her to be particularly old.

But thank goodness there are hosts like you who have the patience to be understanding.

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I am also 75, but aside from forgetting most people’s names after I am first introduced to them, which I’ve always had a problem with, I don’t have any cognitive issues.

I wouldn’t say I have patience with it- rather the opposite, but I can hide it and seem patient for short periods of time.

I just had to deal with a friend who came to visit a couple months ago with the same dementia issues. I actually had to take away a bunch of sleeping pills she had, because she couldn’t tell me what any of them were, couldn’t remember what she’d taken or when, and I was afraid she would OD on something.

I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with parents who had dementia, because I wouldn’t have done well with it.

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Me too. I remember a few years before my dad died. He was in his mid-nineties and he was telling me on the phone that sometimes he would go into a room and forget why he’d done so. I said “dad, I’ve been like that all my life” :slight_smile:

Coping with a loved one with dementia must be incredibly hard.

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