It has been ten years since our family took the plunge and opened a guest cottage in our backyard. While setting up and listing our Cottage on Airbnb I often thought ,”Will this work”? Will any one want to come and stay in our backyard in the suburbs of Sydney? Who would want to stay here?
Well it turns out people did want to stay with us and sometimes, they wanted to come back and stay with us again. Over the years we learnt a little more about them, created some great memories and heard some great stories!
Who are our guests? Why do they choose to stay with us and why do some keep coming back? Of course, there are many reasons, but a key one is helping create wonderful memories.
Before I go any further I should point out that we live on site, over the fence from our Airbnb cottage. We let our guests know that we are just over the fence and if they need anything to ask or just come over. Some guests keep to themselves and others love to have a chat and we end up sharing some great stories and experiences.
My first set of Airbnb guests - like me - were new to the Airbnb platform. They were curious about this new way of connecting hosts and guests. We had some lovely conversations with them about how we set ourselves up. They thought it was great, and when they booked for a return visit a few years later, I was amazed to see they had become Airbnb super hosts themselves!
Our suburb is home to many expatriate families. Over the years we’ve welcomed many guests who have come to visit their son or daughter who is settling into the area with a new partner. This is sometimes followed by a return visit for “the Wedding “ and later “the Grandchildren”. Some years later we might help our guests make their way to our local school for grandparents day or school pick ups and it’s nice to be able to introduce our guests to others in community. Many remote grandparents just love this: feeling like they are truly living like a local and having meaningful interactions in their grandchildren’s lives. I sometimes think I should rename our listing Grandparent’s cottage, but we often welcome children as well.
We had a lovely European family stay. Their children made friends with ours through the fence and before you knew it - despite the language barriers they were all in our back yard laughing and running around having the time of their lives. The parents explained that they lived in an apartment and it was such a novelty to have a garden to play in. The same guests returned several times and remained enchanted with our fairly wild yard. To us it was untidy and needed work, but to those children it was magic just the way it was. The parents later told me that even after seeing the sights of Sydney the highlight for these children was playing in our garden, building forts, jumping on a trampoline, and swinging from the trees on an old tyre swing.
I love our guest’s stories about what everyday life is like in other countries, and how visitors to Australia find our way of life different from their own. Through this family I learnt more about how you keep energetic children entertained in European apartments while snowbound in winter. Apparently, there’s not much time for cups of tea for parents there.
Another lovely experience involved chatting with guests who revealed that they grew up in the area and had their first date - a picnic at the wharf at the end of our street. They told me all about life in our area 50 years ago, where they fished and played in the bush, and more about our local school. They were thrilled to find the cottage, with the wharf still there, now with a handy cafe. They returned to celebrate their anniversary on several occasions.
One of the other uncanny things about hosting is that you tend to attract similar people to yourself - though I guess it does depend on what you write in your listing. I have a passion for sustainability and I love it when guests make comments about the things we do and also when they share more about what is happening in their communities all over the world. I have been impressed with the stories European hosts have told me about recycling schemes in their countries, and was delighted to show a curious family from Asia how to sort their waste for recycling. Little things can have a big impact when you can spread ideas around the world.
Christmas can be a great time to travel. I had one northern hemisphere couple who had loved traveling around Australia as a couple, and they desperately wanted to bring their children to Sydney to see our famous New Year’s Eve fireworks. We had been conversing backwards and forwards for a few years and finally the dates lined up. I wondered if they would like to experience an Australian Christmas Lunch with our family, or would this be too much? It turns out that they did want to join us and despite the different customs and traditions and languages they loved being able to sit outside wearing sunglasses at the table, on a lovely summer’s day, listening to bad Australian Christmas carols and loved eating pavlova.
I remember many of our guests and it’s always nice to open an enquiry from someone who writes “... you may not remember me, but we stayed with you back in…And had such a good time and now we want to bring our children to stay…” And what a privilege to have a couple of guests paint watercolors of our cottage, which now hang on its walls!
For me hospitality is about curating an environment in which I think our guests will feel comfortable and at home, and being there as a friendly yet discreet neighbor.
This topic is part of our Festival of Hospitality 2022. You can find the full line-up here.
