I just had a bad experience with some recent guests. I don't like the idea of leaving a bad review but it's an honest reflection of our experience with them. Is it worth it? Does anybody read them? I note that they don't have negative published reviews from others so I'm not sure why it was so bad with us. Please also note that we have more than 150 reviews and are sitting on 4.9. We provide many extras in the apartment and provided this family with an extra bed at no charge.
Here's what I'd like to say but would love some feedback on how to make this more effective.
"This couple and their children were friendly and keen to make good use of the space during their almost two weeks stay. They were quiet and never rude to our face. Unfortunately, we were left feeling like we were being taken advantage of on a daily basis. Apart from the normal supplies we provide, these guests seemed to want MORE all the time. As a rule, we provide generously for our guests and reviews of our apartments can attest to that, but this family were very different to other guests we have hosted previously. From the moment they arrived, rather than taking responsibility for purchasing their own consumables they wanted more, including rubbish bags (which they didn’t even use in the apartment - used instead to send supplies back with another guest), toilet paper (5 rolls), shampoo, conditioner, body wash (we had already supplied guest sized bottles) and coffee bags (there was instant coffee in the apartment but I provide some coffee bags with their initial supplies which also included fruit, eggs, milk, lemon curd, juice, butter, bagels and basic kitchen food items). While this was unusual, they went further and requested packing tape, even requesting more when they had used up all of the roll we supplied them with. On one occasion they wanted my husband to fix one of the children’s shoes (yet they were able to buy oysters and prawns for their meals - something we can't afford to do). Even though we supplied reusable shopping bags for their use, they found some outside my own kitchen that they liked better and wanted to use those instead. As if that wasn’t enough, they took our cushions and a seating squab with them to a picnic in the park (something even we wouldn’t do) and helped themselves to packing boxes that we had stored in our personal carport, an area which was not available for them to use. The icing on the cake for me was when I found one of the children’s books that we had provided for their use in the apartment in one of the boxes that they were packing up into the car to take with them. I suspect also that they may have helped themselves to some other things, particularly my teaching resources that were stored in the carport that they had obviously looked through. And to say thanks, the apartment was left in a disgusting state; noodles on the floor, toothpaste on the wall of the lounge, stains on the linen and drawing in the guest book. Oh, and for the first two nights in the apartment they even had another adult guest with them whom they had not declared when they booked or talked to us about and had not paid for until we requested it. One time my daughter caught the woman in our house uninvited. Her response was that she was ‘just looking’. Reviews of this family from other Airbnb hosts do not reflect any of these difficulties and I accept that we could have been more assertive in relation to boundaries when the first difficulties arose, but we have never had these challenges with any of our other guests and frankly we were unprepared and surprised. This is the only time I’ve had to leave a negative review about any of our guests and I don’t feel comfortable about it but I think new hosts should be aware. While we remained friendly to them during their stay, I would not welcome these guests again."
