Not only has there been an explosion in the number of short term rentals in my area, but the new listings tend to be next level, with expensive, professional decor and many (some impractical) amenities. They look very corporate, as if they’re probably owned by large investors. We’ll see what this end up meaning for the little guys. We will have to somehow differentiate from those investor-looking properties.
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Thank you. Have been in the STR game since long before Airbnb was invented and have thousands of reviews on their website as well, but always open to suggestions.
Our grievance is legitimate as this is akin to a business partner absconding with cash, when both parties were invested. However in a world of Madoffs and Ponzis one always must stay vigilant, and make decisions predicated upon the assumption that multi-billion dollar MNCs will not give a crap whether or not you lose money on your investment with them.
Have many of these in our region as well, but the bulk are from new listings where there is zero investment, low rates, few amenities, low reviews and yet somehow are on the first page.
Can answer that question from our listing. Exclusively on Airbnb so blocked dates were not the reason for our downturn in bookings.
…but they will be now.
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Well, I’m the originator of this topic, and I’ve had several bookings since I posted it/ we dropped our price and turned on instant booking and allow stays up to 10 days. I agree the market is temporarily saturated, but smart people who aren’t in love with doing it (hosting) will probably start dropping out-
Here’s what I don’t get- who travels someplace to stay in some “professionally decorated” place, so they can what, stay indoors all day and ooh and ahh over the cold grey walls and nondescript paintings? My guests love our in home just for them unit, but they rarely hang around indoors all day.
I can’t imagine choosing an Airbnb because it’s all kooky or unusual or fancy, I choose a place because it’s clean and near the place or people I want to visit.
I think Airbnb has gone overboard on their “special” categories.
It’s confusing and superfluous in my opinion.
Margi
Oh, plenty of guests prefer a homey place to a souless, monochrome, generic-looking place. When a friend asked a guest who pulled up in a shiny new Lexus why he chose her funky, eclectic studio in her old house, when there are high-end hotels in town, he laughed, said he travels a lot on business and prefers to stay at places that feel like a home, not a corporate, faceless hotel room.
There are also guests who have been burned booking those property-managed, investor listings, experiencing lack of communication, poor response to issues, a refusal to refund anything for legitimate issues impacting their stays, and while they may look great in photos when they are new, all sleek and shiny, they tend to start getting low cleanliness scores after awhile. Those guests will be looking for listings in the future with hands-on hosts with good reviews, who are actually attentive to their guests and take some pride in their rental and how they host.
Of course, hosts have been asking Airbnb to separate these corporate-managed properties from real-hosted properties in search for years, but they have covered their ears to that.
Airbnb has no emotional attachment to any host, their property or their money. As far as they are concerned, your heart and soul and $5 will get them a happy hour beer. Two bookings from a lesser and lower priced competitor brings them as much money as one booking from your place.
repeat…Airbnb doesn’t care about your feelings and they don’t have any.
I messed with the stock market for years. Now that was painful. At least with a property you can always sell, rent or live in it. Stocks aren’t anything.
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Solid. Gold. :
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Here is an article from today regarding Maui’s tourism. It’s funny…some folks call it “recovery” while others wish it away.
This is in response to chore lists and extra fees conversation.
We are our cleaners… We choose to pay our own taxes, they are rolled into the price and that is stated on the listing if guests read. We keep our cleaning fee but it is 49$. We might roll that into room total before Airbnbn rolls in all the fees together. To me it looks like the Airbnbn fee, the usual silent culprit, and the taxes they collect are the unknowns to booking guests.
Nowhere on my listing is a chore list except inside a guest book. I think it says “tidy the kitchen and throw wet towels on the patio.” Hundreds of guests and no comments. Often they ask what they need to do, due I think to having encountered long lists at other strs.
re: Hotels, they seem to run more expensive than original price, things like resort fees, high taxes etc.
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My most recent homeshare guest said she just finds it easier to ask how each hosts want things done, or left before check-out.
I’ve had some guests bring down any empty bottles from their room and put them in the recycling box, as well as emptying the garbage can in their room and bathroom, and while I certainly appreciate that, I really don’t care if they do anything.
I can tell if towels are used or not, because I don’t put any out on the towel racks- they are folded up on a shelf. If they are used, I find them on the towel rods, the unused ones still folded neatly as I left them. I must get unusually respectful guests, because I’ve never found a wet towel wadded up, left on the floor, draped over a chair, or on the bed.
I send a message the night before checkout saying I hope they enjoyed their stay, make sure all is turned off, lock the front door, key in box and have a safe trip home. I really don’t ask them to do anything and no one throws wet towel on the floor.
And trying not to acknowledge the part of my brain screaming, “WTF; they stole the F’ing LAMP!”
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Well, yeah! Weird to have a lamp and all the other stuff missing for sure! But yes, I did finally find it, the other stuff too… but took some time sadly. So the original comment - that I ask guests to leave the home the way they found it? That is why I said what I said… Quite honestly, this hasn’t happened since last Summer, they were one of my first guests when we started STR-ing it. Maybe a one off, and a guest I might not want to have back again if they can’t supervise their child’s behavior or correct it after? IDK…
Do you do 1 night stays? I used to allow people to book only 1 night & most of them were great, but I moved to a minimum of 2 nights & that helped weed out a lot of the problem guests… it still happens occasionally but not as much as it did with 1 night stays.
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oh, well… i do, and I also write “no checkout chores” in my description, and I have a $0 cleaning fee. If a guest is truly gross, they’ll get a fee (eg, the vomit boys from last week got a $500 cleaning fee from me, and they paid it). Guests who smoke and make me use the ozone machine, that’s $100 (which is cheap cos apparently hotels charge you min $300 for breaching smoking rooms). I feel no guilt about charging such fees when I’m the one being trustful in the first place.
this must be so out of context, lol, cos what the heck is the correlation? way off topic but too funny I just had to highlight it.
I’m trying to channel the ghandi thing of ‘be the change’. I am assuming that all guests will be clean - and they are! so I don’t charge a fee, instead I have no fees, and punish the shitty guests.
Also, IIRC as part of the winter release there was some promise that there would be some new info around chores and cleaning fees that would be implemented “early 2023”. I wasn’t overly active in the forums in the forums in Dec/January, so i didn’t see if anything was said about it, and now I’m banned, there’s few like me who would even dare ask the question, has anything happened ?
The Winter Release was full of a load of BS, and the usual amount of guests and hosts fell for it. I too thought it was great if they were going to actually address the cleaning fee problem, but I can’t see anything new and it’s now past “early 2023” when they promised we’d see this change. if any of you are active in the abb forums perhaps you’ll dare to ask this question?
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What? Non sequitur, lol. You’ve missed the point by taking one line from my comment and thus completely removing or ignoring its context lol. I’m lol-ing because what it meant when I originally stated it to SleepingCoyote was, “sorry, you’re missing the point”
Here’s what I said with the required context:
Are you not reading any of the other posts?? No one cares about the chore free thing. It’s not important. What was important is that Margi is entering the listing while her guests are out for the day without telling them that she is going to do that.
Margi started the post with a conversation about advertising “chore-free”. Although not uninteresting or irrelevant, it was a fairly mundane discussion without any strong emotions or conflict- just a congenial chat really, nothing exciting and certainly “no nerves were hit".
However, at some point Margi started bragging about sneaking into her entire-unit-Airbnb-listing when her guests go out for the day. She went as far as to say, “knock on wood, I’ve not been caught”. She seemed to think that it was both clever and acceptable, but most of us were shocked by her confession.
When she was told that it was unacceptable, would afford a guest a refund, is against the TOS, could get her listing removed, etc she was argumentative and dismissive about it so many of us became outright dismayed.
The conversation took a turn and got fired up exclusively because of Margi’s confession that she sneaks in while her guests have gone out (and had nothing at all to do with the chore-free discussion).
So when SleepingCoyote said, “Margi1 Your posts and mine seem to have hit a nerve 
Good". I wanted to clarify for her that if something hit a nerve it was the sneaking into the unit and not at all to do with the chore-free discussion, e.g. “no one cares, it’s not important, what’s important is…”. However, it turned out that SleepCoyote also thought it was acceptable to sneak in which further complicated the conversation. So I can see how you got confused, lol.
Anyway, to the conversation you were trying to start, as far as the chore-free thing, I suppose I don’t actually care. It’s really not of my concern either way. As a host, I have never given my guests any chores. And as a guest, I’ve never had a host give me any chores (but I can’t imagine it would bother me if they did). It seems like it must be a demographic-dependent issue or even just an internet sensation of sorts. Plainly, it just doesn’t have any effect on me, that’s all.
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Yeah I was ignoring the bit where she was going into the suite. I didn’t care to weigh in on that as it’s a unique situation that has no bearing on my hosting style.
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That’s fine but that’s why you completely misappropriated my quote because that is what it was about (not the chores issue).
That’s exactly how I feel about “chores”, lol.
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It is nice problem to have but I am booked out two months in advance and we are in the Autumn shoulder season. I don’t know if it helped but I got rid of the cleaning fee and raised my rates to adjust for this. I still ask people to tidy up and sort and take out the rubbish and strip the beds and leave the sheets in the bath so I can reach them in my wheelchair as I do the laundry but not the cleaning. Not everybody does but that’s okay.