Hi there,
We would like to know what the Resolution Centre will support us on regarding these two issues:
We've experienced a situation where our guests were hours later than agreed to checkin, and did not contact us until much later in the day. As we don't have an accessible lockbox for the key (high rise city apartment), we checkin the guests personally. Their late arrival resulted in wasting the entire afternoon.
We have already prepared a rule in our booking for ocassions where if guests are more than half an hour later than agreed without a reason such as a flight delay, we state that we will charge a $40AUD late fee (after experiencing a couple of previous laissez-faire arrivals we tightened up on our rules).
When we took this to the resolution centre, the guest messaged us personally, apologising, and explaining they misplaced their camera at the airport and went looking for it, which is why they were late, and therefore they don't want to pay the fee.
While we understand things happen, it was an incident of their own doing, and it was within their control to communicate they would be later than expected, but didn't.
Since we value our time, and had to forego other commitments that afternoon, we intend on following through with charging the fee.
The other issue was that we learnt that our guests at about 3:30pm still hadn't checked out, although checkout was at 10am (we also sent a farewell message earlier in the day). This resulted in needing to reschedule the clean, and getting them to checkout as soon as possible.
For this incident, we also decided to charge for a half day stay (also via the resolution centre). While this rule was not in our official rules (but it is now), they agreed to this, noting they kind of "forgot" to pay attention to when checkout was - so we assume this portion will be okay?
So two questions, based on our reading on the community forums:
1: Can we enforce the late arrival fee? Our research seemed a bit inconclusive whether AirBnB resolutions centre supports it.
2: We have read that when a guest checks out later than agreed to, the best course of action is to phone AirBnB and they will charge.. a full double night's stay to the guest? In the instance of charging a half-day fee, did we go about the right course of action, and did could we have effectively recouped more than we charged for this rule break?
Our aims are to keep our prices fair for everyone, so when rule breakers come about, we would rather load the costs back onto them as the perpetrators.
