Issue: the selection field of number of guests

[Retreat28]

We are running a small retreat center at the East cost of South Korea. It is designed to nurture people to have a calm and relaxed time with the family and to practice mindfulness and meditation at our premise. We have faced some problems and wish to have your perspectives about the problems.

In the past, we were able to designate the number of children and adults; however, a few months ago, the selection fields were disappeared and replaced with only one filed of total number of persons.The problem that we have faced for the past few months is that one of our room is adequate for only one family (2 adults and 2 children maximum); and we set 4 for the total number of people. This created the serious problem on our end that 4 adults ended up making reservations. One team broke a designer's marvel dinner table (currently the case is under the care of resolution center).

Another team checked in yesterday did a house party over night and the guests of other room woke up 4 o'clock in the morning and complained directly to that team. This could lead to a hostile confrontation between those two teams. The non-compliant party team was obviously heavily intoxicated and could do severe aggressive, possible criminal and even homicidal behaviors against the innocent family with a small child. 

We are panicked and applied the preventive measures. We immediately set the number of people to 2 (instead of 4 or 3) and added a line at the Title section (2 adults+2 children). We also notified all future guests through Airbnb messaging system that people should follow the rules of our policy and airbnb policy of prohibition of party, no heavy drinking, no fire hazard activities etc. 
 

I hope you all may have similar issues and I am curious about how to handle this kind of situation. I have sent a feedback to airbnb to let us select the number of adults and children. The following is the location of the fields.

Current:
Listing-Listing Detail-Property and guests-Number of guests (total number of guests)

Please switch to specified number of guests  
-Number of Adults
-Number of Children (or Minors)

Thank you for your feedback.

Don, Retreat Soom in AYA

[Huma0]

@Retreat28 

Sorry to hear about your problems. I don't have any direct advice as I don't accept under 18s at my listings. It is a shame you have had to reduce the number of guests at your listing because of this change from Airbnb. Clearly, hosting a family of four is not the same as hosting four adults.

I am not sure what else you can do other than what you already have. The important thing is to spell it out everywhere, including in your House Rules (so that you have back up if you have to report problem guests). 

It's also very important to have proper communication with guests before/as soon as they book and that includes them specifying exactly who is in their group. Do not rely on guests to read your listing/rules by themselves as many don't. So, I insist that every guest confirms with me that they have read these and agree to them. If they don't, then I won't take their booking or will cancel it if they instant booked.

As for heavily intoxicated guests disturbing other guests at 4am, I would have called Airbnb (if you can manage to get through these days) and asked for the guests to be relocated. They are breaking your rules in a serious way and disturbing other guests. They need to leave.

[Diana2475]

@Retreat28 this is really exciting!  I'm learning how to use the Airbnb Resource Center -- something about which I knew nothing -- and had NO IDEA we could reach out to other Hosts.  THIS IS WONDERFUL!

I posted a query about intoxicated guests, and your post popped up.  You handled it well.  It can be difficult.

Thank you for sharing this. I learned something!

@Diana34

[Mary1523]

Sorry to hear about the problem you faced.

I have a listing that is only suitable for a family ie max 2 adults, max 3 kids but Airbnb as you state, takes the guest size max as 5. So I can't automatically enforce this to your point.

So what I do is make it clear in every part of the listing that its not for all Adults. Here's my listing and I state I won't accept bookings if it comes through with more than 2 adults and 0 children (guests do have to tell you when they book how many children in a booking). And I double check with them manually. It's the best you can do. Btw, infants in a cot don't count in the guest booking total.

airbnb.com.au/h/owoodwest

Hope this helps