Hello all! For anyone who wants to read my venting...
I'm a rather seasoned airbnb traveller - Airbnb is my preferred travel accomodation! However, I've recently had a few sour experiences and I am looking for a bit of encouragement from the community. The last one really brought me down.
I'm an American living in France. So I took a weekend trip to Rennes with a friend, stayed for two nights. The host wasn't there when we arrived but she got a friend to let us in and show us the place. It was dinner time, so then I sent our host a text to say thank you and we went into the city center to eat on the terrasses (restaurant patios?). and, as we often do in france, our dinner stretched until nearly midnight by the time we got to dessert. The host wasn't there the next morning and basically the same thing happened the second night. we thought it funny we never got to meet, but it was no problem for us. We cleaned up after ourselves and hoped she wouldn't be offended.
Got home to Bordeaux, left a positive grateful review and gave the host the benefit of the doubt. Then I opened up quite a bitter review from her!!
Apparently she was annoyed that we didn't take the time to meet her and we woke her up in the middle of the night, so she called us partiers (fetardes). I swear we were TIP TOEING when we got back, and my friends would all have a good laugh if they knew someone called me a partier!
SIGH. 😞 😞
I just have to rant a bit.
I would NEVER want to offend anyone and am always trying to be considerate when in other peoples' homes. I'm NOT the kind of guest that expects an airbnb to be like a hotel. The fact that we never met was not an issue for me. I've been in airbnb's where the hosts were really hands off or others who ran things almost like hotels. It's hard to know what hosts expect.
If meeting really was that important to her, maybe she should have arranged to be there when we arrived, or, I suppose tell us to wait for her at her apartment instead of eating dinner?!? I also don't tend to plan an 'itinerary' when I'm on vacation so I honestly had no idea that we were going to still be at the restaurant at midnight!
This is my second bad apple and I know most of my experiences have been good. It's just really not cool to get hate notes after a nice vacation. I know I shouldn't give too many fcks about what random strangers think, but I guess I'm more sensitive than I thought.
Moving forward, I'm wondering if I should revise my airbnb room search process or just take a break from AirBnB for a while.
