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‘George did not leave our house clean. I asked George not to cook smelly food during his stay. However the guest ignored me and left our Airbnb smelling of curry and fish. As per our house rules the guest are asked to wash the dishes, however the guest left this for me to clean.’
Guest has 5 pieces of feedback
Every other host recommended the guest
Joined in April 2022
Whole house booking for 3 nights
4.5 overall feedback
Would you hosts this guest? Why?
It depends if he’s booking a whole house or a room in someone’s home. If it’s a whole house rental and it’s at least a 5 night stay, I would rent to him. If it were a room in my house, no.
Ours is a whole house rental to @Ritz3 's point, and I would rent to him again.
First, I would not have a rule about not cooking ‘smelly’ food. Does this mean I couldn’t use garlic? What is ‘smelly’ to you might be fragrant to me. I actually don’t have a good sense of smell at all, so I just wouldn’t know what not to cook. Plus, I’d be a little put off by that kind of direction. Can’t you just open the windows for a bit? Others might agree with you because I have seen this kind of direction before and it baffles me. Was this rule in the listing? If not, I would think the guest could reasonably ignore it.
Second, as to the dishes, I don’t know how dirty they were, how many there were (did they not clean dishes for the whole stay and left you with all of them?) whether the food was encrusted, whether it appeared to have been left like that for days, or whether they were dishes from breakfast. So my reaction would depend on the particulars. But if it was just dishes from the last morning, maybe the night before, I would let it go. Why? It just seems like a small thing that would take me or my cleaners 20 minutes or so to clean. Nothing was broken or damaged.
I would host him. The host who wrote the review seems overly picky to me.
As @HostAirbnbVRBO says, what is smelly? The one thing I cannot abide to smell is cooked broccoli. Other hosts will feel differently. And what’s wrong with the smell of curry?
I’d say that about 50% of my guests (in the apartment that doesn’t have a dishwasher) leave dirty dishes in the sink and it’s no big deal. I inspect everything in the cupboard anyway and often have to rewash things. It’s part of the job.
The host who wrote that review needs to rethink the meaning of the word hospitality and possibly contemplate a different line of work.
Poor George.
That gave me a chuckle !
A 5 week stay and the house smelt like an Indian restaurant from the front door. All the curtains in the house had to be washed / dry cleaned, the floor rugs had to be professionally done twice, kitchen walls and ceiling had to washed down and the rags came away yellow with turmeric staining. It was a lot of work and expense!
yum. haha. my fave indian restaurant is really pungent, smells amazing to me.
but, I understand what you mean, the after-smell of some cooked foods is not great (I think lamb and salmon are the worst). My mum lived in an old 1940s apartment that smelled like old cabbage in the hallways, it was gross. That smell never went away in the 5 years she lived there. I can imagine a 5 week stay where the guest cooks a lot and clearly doesn’t clean up much is going to be quite time consuming to clean.
Also: an ozone machine resolves these smells, although turmeric stains on surfaces is next level!
I probably would be ok with this guest for a short stay. Unless you know you can easily rent your place out, in which case, maybe not? I rarely decline but i do try to talk some guests out of booking .
We offer a whole house listing and ask guests to leave the kitchen the way they found it. We don’t including the cost of cleaning the kitchen in the cleaning fee. I don’t mind devoting an hour to prepping it, but when people leave dirty dishes it means they’ve completely ignored that rule.
I would host based on the other reviews being positive.
Perhaps message him first: Our policies state that guests are to leave the kitchen as found. According to your reviews, please let me know before booking if you have any questions about that.
I appreciate the hosts honest review. Perhaps they should be specific about what food they don’t want cooked in their home in their policies so guests can decide if the house is right for them.
Yes I’d probably host him. I don’t think you can ask guests not to cook smelly food and this sounds a bit racist to me. There must be an extractor and windows to open to get rid of smells. I wouldn’t not host because of that - we can’t tell people what to cook.
I wouldn’t not host because someone didn’t do their washing up. Why? Because some people won’t, ans some people won’t sometimes. Give them the benefit of the doubt. For me it makes no sense not to host for this reason as it’s part of the business
I would too. But I doubt I’d rent from that host!
I don’t understand this. You don’t expect to have to do any cleaning in the kitchen area when guests check out? I can certainly understand expecting guests to wash up their dishes, and not leave a stovetop swimming in grease, or globs of jam on the countertop or table, but “leave it as you found it” would mean the guests are expected to wipe down cupboard doors, clean out the coffemaker and toaster, wash out the sink, sterilize faucet handles, make sure everything is put away where you keep it, etc, etc. Not something I would expect of guests. And a few dirty coffee cups or breakfast dishes, if it meant the difference between them checking out on time or not seems like not a big deal.
Actually, I said that I expect to spend an hour cleaning the kitchen.
No, you said you spend an hour prepping it, not cleaning it. Prepping, to me, means replenishing supplies, putting things back where you like to keep them, etc.
Mostly I was commenting on the “leave it as you found it” phrase, which I know a lot of hosts use, but seems odd to me. If guests left a place as they found it, that would mean they cleaned to the standard that it would be ready for the next guests to check in,and no cleaning at all would be necessary.
Are you saying you don’t pay your cleaners to clean the kitchen? Or you are cleaning yourself and the fee doesn’t cover all the cleaning? Which is true for many of us. I only charge $10-30 for cleaning because there’s a growing dislike amongst guests for large cleaning fees and too many house rules, esp upon checkout. There’s no way the cleaning fee covers our time (we do the turnovers ourselves), and it’s so small I have no issue with charging a guest more should they leave a giant mess, which has only happened once (vomit) and I charged $125 and they quickly paid it. What i don’t expect guests to do is return the kitchen to the same clean state they had upon arrival. Nor would I trust them to do that. If we walk in and the kitchen is perfect, we still check the glassware, cutlery and crockery to see if they’ve used things, and handwashed items, usually these will all have to be re-washed.
It takes 20+ hours to clean the house, so I normally clean with 3 others and the fee doesn’t cover the full cost of cleaning. I pay the others a good wage to clean.
By asking guests to leave the kitchen as they found it, I know to expect it not to be in the same condition, but normally there is some effort made to at least clean up their cooking messes and dishes they used. I spend an hour (or more) making sure it is ready for the next guests. Every cupboard, appliance, counter, drawer, etc. is checked and made right, floors vacuumed and mopped.
My goal when cleaning is to have it as close to perfect as possible - constantly thinking of how I would like the house if I were a guest arriving for the first time.