For over a year and a half, I ran a humble but thriving Air BnB in the Brooklyn apartment I am struggling to keep in the face of rapid fire gentrification. I was a laid back host who always welcomed guests to treat my home as their own. Between guests, I cleaned everything- curtains, pillows, everything. I worked so hard to create the sort of space I would want to share.
In the winter, things would slow down for a few months and then pick up in the spring. This spring they haven't picked up. At all. My account has literally no activity. Needless to say, I am worried.
It's now April. In February, I hosted two guests who were new to Air BnB. As it was my dead season, I had a roommate and took the very occasional booking for a different bedroom. Although I have learned to grin and bear it through pretty much everything, my roommate had a very hard time with these guests. They spoke loudly outside her door into the wee hours of the night. They holed up in the bathroom for three hours the next morning, loudly splashing and having some sort of "romp" we didn't want to visualize. My roommate, not having grown accustomed to quickly using the bathroom at a synagogue down the street and going to work dirty, was profoundly upset as she rushed to a meeting not even having gotten to pee. I knew I had to take some sort of action, and I called Air BnB for advice.
My experiences calling Air BnB have been a mixed bag. For some reason, on this day I got a gentleman who really cared, so much so that he opened a case and someone contacted the guests. When I next saw them, they were standoffish and everything became incredibly uncomfortable. Like now I'm sharing my home with these two women who hate my guts.
They left a vicious, factually inaccurate, one star across the board review. It changed my overall stats. (Location was always a 4.5 star category for me- I live deep in the heart of Brooklyn, and most tourist attractions involve a subway ride, a fact my listing doesn't disguise. But cleanliness? That hurts...) And since then I have received not a single booking. Air BnB says that the review does not violate their standards, although the guests essentially say that I "ratted them out" and describe things that straight up don't exist (a "broken badge" on the front door that leads out to my terrifying neighborhood.) At this point, I don't know what recourse I have. It's just devastating to imagine that one guest can completely destroy everything I worked so hard to build.
Thank you so much for any insight or advice you might have...
