Enforcing House Rules

[Andrea352]

I recently rented my beach cottage for a week to three people with a dog.  My rules clearly state that dogs are to be crated when left unattended.  I had to go check on the exterior of the cottage because a hurrican was approaching.  The guests car wasn't there, and I saw a dog peering through the blinds.  It was very obvious the dog was left unattended loose in the house.  I message the guest and confronted them.  This was day 5 of their stay.  They then started complaning about the property and how it wasn't clean when they checked in.   They said they didn't feel like they needed to crate their dog because of this.  I said that was unacceptabe and that they should have contacted me on day one if they weren't satifisfied.  I said I would've sent someone or come myself to accomidate them.  Now they left me a terrible review.  I'm a superhost with consistent 5 star reviews, so this is very unusal and upsetting.  They wrote about issues that noone has ever brought up and are baseless.  It is obvious they were upset that I confronted them.  

My partner thinks we shouldn't have confronted them.  However, I feel like we should address the issue when it occurs to protect our property and no be taken advantage of.  Since they broke our rules, we couldn't evicted them.  Should we have done that?  I want to know if others have experienced similar scenarios and if they resolved the issue without getting a bad retalatory review.  

[Andrea352]

Sorry for the typos.  It should say, "we could evict them because they broke the rules."  We didn't evict them because we were trying to be nice, but in retrosepct, maybe we should have.  I am very concerned that this bad review will prevent me from getting bookings in the future.

[Carol125]

Will evicting them keep them from being able to review you? Then that would be our best option. You help people would be reasonable but sometimes they aren't. The review process disempowers us when there's no face-to-face

[Alice-and-Jeff0]

You HAVE to have a conversation with them, especially since they admitted to violating the rules and excusing their own behavior because of some "fault" of yours. How do crating a dog and cleanliness of the property go together - they don't and it's pretty ridiculous that they used that as an excuse to not follow the rules.  How childish! 

There is no way to stop someone from leaving you a bad review and by calling them on a rules violation is likely to cause someone will complain.  This is definitely a challenge and only yesterday I started a conversation about it in the Host Circle -- https://community.airbnb.com/t5/Host-Circle/A-discussion-of-House-Rules-Violations-and-Ratings/td-p/...

A piece of advice:  you responded to this guest in a way that hosts here would tell you actually makes this review WORSE than it is.  Eventually this would get lost amoung the other reviews but you wrote a BOOK trying to explain yourself and how baseless their claims were.  EVERYONE is going to look at this and want to read it now. The way you respond to the part that's historical to your listing says way more than one guest's complaint that the vent in the kitchen is loose.  

And on top of it, you wrote her a nice review and never even mentioned that she gave you grief about check in, the dog, trying to send packages in advance and the mirade of other things you mention in your response.  This means that every other host who looks at Nadia's profile in the future only sees that you think she could have done a better job communicating but not that there were issues. Certainly I hope you marked her down for House Rule Violations, Communications and gave her a thumbs down.  

It is definitely disappointing to have a bad guest.  We all get one from time to time and they sometimes have their own weird crap going on only to take it out on their hosts.  So sorry that you are hurting right now from the sting of a bad review and disrespectful guest.  

[Annette33]

after this experience, how about : "no pets" in your house rules.

That would easily prevent some future troubles I believe, especially as you cannot be there regularly.

Can you possibly still edit your long reply to Nadia ? It does more harm than good.

If you gave it one extra day between check outs and check ins, you could make it your business to personally inspect the place and really make sure it is clean. Then if people say no, it wasn't clean, you can face them with much more conviction and authority...

And please, lets all write honest reviews on our guests: instead of praising them, lets be polite but clear and honest about certain things they  have done that are out of line. It will help the next host, it will remind that guest of some possible consequences, and it preserves our integrity.

Ps : Your place looks great - and all the stellar reviews you have speak for themselves.