Hi @Alex ,
In some areas with permit regulations for short term rentals, parking is a very hot topic. Here's how we manage:
- we are in a market that only has guests that arrive by vehicle and so parking is essential for any short term rental. Once you arrive to our home we are walking distance to our local main street restaurants, shopping, event venues and so the daily use of a vehicle is mitigated by our proximity.
- We are in an area with short term regulations that cap the quantity of parking made available. The maximum possible for a short term rental is one spot per bedroom, even if space allows for more. The size of the individual parking space is also regulated with the dimensions of the available spots needing to meet specific square footage criteria.
- we are a 4 bedroom house and thus can offer a maximum of 4 parking spots.
- we have a parking plan that we share with each reservation. This info is fairly prominent in our listing as well. Our parking plan & permit limitations is re-iterated with each of our messages as well as with signage at the house. In our case, we only have space for up to 4 vehicles. Any additional vehicles end up parked illegally (like on a lawn, or road with no street parking, etc).
- in general our parking plan works just fine but we do have an occasional AIRBNB guests who arrive with the need for more parking. There is no street parking in our neighborhood, also very typical in our market. The only option is to use a parking lot in town for this case. This is not very convenient for a guest on vacation and so we try to make sure we are communicating our permit limitations effectively to avoid this scenario.
- The AIRBNB guest that arrives with the need for more parking usually doesn't care about the messaging and has parked outside of our permitted parking plan thus exposing us to a very large permit fine and loss of our short term rental permit. In our market the permit fine is $1000. Losing our short term rental permit to keep an AIRBNB guest happy isn't in our best interest and so we have exterior cameras over our parking area and when noted that there is an issue we bring it up with the guest. This always aggravates the guest and leaves us exposed to retaliatory behaviour, bad feelings and a potential poor review. No one likes to be told they are breaking the rules, no matter how diplomatically or empathetically we communicate. It always leaves a bad taste for both sides. Because of this we try very hard to communicate our permit limitations early and often.
- my goal is to try and create a system that removes this issue all together. We aren't there yet! A big barrier is communicating with a guest-of-a-guest who just doesn't care about the underlying issues - there is no direct line to this guest and a poor review from a host doesn't matter nor does a fine as they are not on the hook.
