Guest wants to check in a day late

[Fergus32]

I have a guest who has messaged me asking to check in a day late. They are prepared to pay for the night they’ll miss but I am unavailable to check them in the day after. I don’t want to use a lockbox as the guest has no reviews and has been very difficult to deal with prior to arrival.

They are due to arrive tomorrow (Monday) and stay for a week but want to push check in out to Tuesday. I won’t be available to check them in at all after the check in date that’s in their booking (tomorrow, Monday)

Where so I stand?

[Anonymous]

@Fergus32   You've put yourself in a bad position here because your listings' check-in window ("After 3 PM") is open-ended. That basically means your guests are entitled to check in at any point from 3 PM on day 1 right up to the checkout date. If you're not available around the clock to check in guests, I strongly recommend that you immediately tighten up that check-in window (e.g. 3 PM - 10 PM).

For this guest, the best option would be to ask a friend or neighbor to check him in on your behalf. Even if they're not familiar with the property, they can at least report back to you on whether the guest is on the up and up. Another option would be to leave the keys at a trusted nearby business with reliably long opening hours. 

If none of these options are possible for you, the challenge will be to work out how to get the guest to cancel without either of you being penalized. If the guest cancels, they lose a lot of money in service fees even if you refund the room rate. But if you ask Airbnb to cancel, you might get hit with a hefty penalty because you didn't set an end time to your check-in period. If you're available to check the person in on, say, Wednesday, you might propose a booking alteration and see if the guest is amenable to finding alternate accommodation for the first night. 

[Fergus32]

Thanks, makes sense. Would it not be reasonable to interpret "after 3pm" as referring to the check in day? In other words. after 3pm on 8/8 really means between 3pm and midnight on 8/8 and not any day that the guest chooses to show up.

[Helen744]

@Fergus32 international travellers can take some extra time in Ireland to arrive anywhere .I know I did . I would talk with them as much as possible but their phones may not be working either , leave copious instructions and a co hosts number, you really should have a co host, and leave the lock box but check in later or even every day after they arrive, if you yourself are out of the country then alert a friend or neighbour and pay them to check in on your guests. Oh and cross your fingers H

[Fergus32]

I'm not leaving keys in a lockbox. They have no reviews and have been really sketchy in the past week (they had covid and wanted to cancel but when I said no, they no longer had covid). They also changed their flights and the house is less than an hour from the airport.

I just want to know if I am obliged to facilitate their check in a day late or not. I hope not as I have a bad feeling about this guest.

[Helen744]

@Fergus 32 maybe call or message a rep. Unlike yourself I could not afford to let go a weeks booking at this stage but a guest turning up later is a question I cannot answer .Obviously the flights are creating an issue , if they arrive in the country then someone who knows how to access your system or even you could quiz them a bit further . You can leave a lock box but not give them the code until the last minute or look up another accomodation for them nearby . It seems to be about your time parameters rather than the suitability of the guest . Especially being in Dublin . People may simply have no idea about how to get to your place or anything else until they arrive.I remember arriving in Dublin from australia and really we were just bumbling fools . We must have exasperated our hosts who were delightful one and all. Good luck. We stayed in Dublin twice and saw no host at all  though. H

[Helen744]

also the flights may have been changed because they were still testing positive or are wanting you to cancel so they can get a refund .

[Anonymous]

@Fergus32 

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Would it not be reasonable to interpret "after 3pm" as referring to the check in day? In other words. after 3pm on 8/8 really means between 3pm and midnight on 8/8 and not any day that the guest chooses to show up.

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I can see both sides of it here. Sure, Airbnbs are not like hotels with 24-hour desk service, and hosts can't be expected to arrange their schedules to check in guests whichever day within the booking the guests turn up. But if you intend for your check-in window to close at midnight, you can put that in the listing - otherwise, guests have every reason to assume that if their flight is delayed and they happen to arrive after midnight, they still have a valid booking. It's just a matter of covering your bases.

Your bad feeling about the guest may well be justified but it's, unfortunately, not going to be a useful defense if you try to get out of the booking without penalties. Once you've chosen to accept a request, it's no longer relevant whether the guest has prior reviews or not. So if there's an alternate check-in method that you'd facilitate for a guest who you felt more confident about, that would be the right thing to do with this one too. As suspicious as the guest's Covid story sounds, it would be rather odd to refuse to let them cancel but then also refuse to let them check in.

There is a slight chance that if you called customer service about this one, you could talk them into granting you a penalty-free cancellation. It's a long shot, and the result would still be that you'd lose the whole payout and potentially ruin someone's trip, but if the guest seems truly untrustworthy it might be the least-worst option. Still, it happens all the time that guests have travel delays and disruptions, so even if you don't go the lockbox route, it's really important that you have some kind of backup plan for accommodating those.

[Fergus32]

I finally spoke to an Airbnb rep who told me that the check in window was from check-in time (3pm) in my case and midnight on the check-in day.

The guest in question hasn’t been delayed. They simply changed their plans and I’m not obliged to accommodate the new check-in day.

Of course, in normal circumstances, I’d bend over backwards to accommodate a guest but my experience with this guest has been awful and I don’t feel good about hosting them. In the latest development, they wrote to the saying that they have changed their flights to arrive at 830am on 9 August but they they claimed that this entire statement was a “typo” and they had not changed their arrival time. Then 2 hours later, Airbnb messaged me again to say they had changed their arrival date. The whole thing is a mess and is compounded by the fact that there are half a dozen Airbnb reps involved who all act in a different way with zero coordination. Yesterday I got 2 phone calls in 5 mins from different Airbnb reps with different information on this case. 

[Anonymous]

@Fergus32  Yes that's exactly the result you can expect from Airbnb's outsourced customer service operation - no consistency, no clue. If you contact them knowing precisely what end result you want, there's a chance that you might persuade one of the reps to deliver it, but if you want information or advisory, you might as well be talking to a cat.

Did you specifically ask them for a penalty free cancellation, or were you hoping for a resolun that allowed you to keep your payout? 

[Fergus32]

Airbnb proposed a resolution whereby the guest would cancel and I would refund the guest if I was able to rent the property to someone else for the nights they had booked. In fact 2 different reps offered this to me but a third rep refused to acknowledge this and told me it was not an option. Another issue is that they appear to have nobody working European timezones. The other night I had 4 missed calls from Airbnb between 3 and 4am and last night another rep messaged me at 4am and told me I had an hour to reply to her question.

It's like children's football where you have 22 kids all chasing the ball at the same time and making zero progress.

[Anonymous]

@Fergus32  That "resolution" would require the cancellation to be initiated by the guest, and for you to voluntarily transfer a refund value to him in the Resolution Center. It's not something they actually coordinate on your behalf. If you can get the guest to agree to it, that's great. But if he refuses to cancel without a full refund, you're back to square one.

Good luck with that...

[Huma0]

@Anonymous 

Please don't be insulting to cats. They may not offer information or advisory, but even my cats know they are not going to get any response from me between 3 and 4am, and when they want something from me (dinner, for me to get out of bed when I'm having a lie in), they are quite coordinated about it. The same cannot be said of CS.

[Gwen386]

Oh @Huma0, they are beautiful and I don’t even like cats 😁

[Huma0]

Thanks @Gwen386 . As you can see, they are ganging up on me. Like I said, coordinated, unlike a lot of CS reps. 

As for this particular situation, it's a tricky one. It sounds like @Fergus32 only started to become uncomfortable with this guest after the booking was accepted (or maybe it was an IB, I don't know), because of their constantly changing plans and contradictory accounts. It could just be that the guests are disorganised, but claiming to have COVID to try to get a refund and then changing the story would also put a bad taste in my mouth.

I had a slightly similar situation once. I was able to check the guests in on another day as I'm a live in host, but they changed the date and time several times, usually giving me very short notice about it, so it was frustrating. The main thing though was I was sure the guests were lying about having COVID (their excuse for the second date change) as the story just didn't add up. Once I made it clear that they wouldn't get a refund for the nights they missed, they were suddenly ready to check in the next day, to which I said no, sorry, you cannot come to my shared listing with COVID! You have to complete a quarantine first, send me negative test results etc. So, they shot themselves in the foot.

I did feel uncomfortable about hosting these guests because, if they lied about that, what else were they going to do? They turned out not to be the worst guests ever, but they were certainly problematic in several ways and I would not host them again. Did I have enough reason to cancel their stay though? I'm not sure. I had a hunch they were lying (and disorganised), but I don't think that was reason enough not to honour the booking.