I so need some advice about this.
I'm a new airbnb host, though I did join briefly back in 2016, to find that my daily workload didn't allow for giving full attention to guests. However, I did receive a glowing review from that period.
After starting up again, I hosted my first guest a few days ago. She requested a stay for one, and then changed that to two, once we began messaging and i realized her 11 year-old daughter would be accompanying her. She arrived in a camper van that had doodads glued all over it, with a hoarder's supply of more doodads jammed in the cab and camper. She was quite a free spirit, she informed me, adding that her ex-husband was summoning her to court to claim full custody of their daughter. But she'd written a letter to the judge during this pre-trial stage, explaining why she'd pulled her daughter out of school and was traveling around the country with her. Sort of a free-spirit school, I gathered. She also shared that she 'used to be a horrible alcoholic.' I asked if she was in the AA program. No, she said, that hadn't worked for her. Apparently she'd simply swapped the addiction to alcohol to the love of affixing doodads on doodads.
She began moving her collection of those into the apartment, and spent the first day jamming the place with them. For some inexplicable reason, she invited me in, and I noticed brown stains on the wall-to-wall carpet. Yes, she giggled, she'd tripped while carrying the coffee pot from the kitchen area to the couch. No big deal.
She invited a guy friend over, and he wound up spending the night. Meanwhile, I noticed that her camper van was leaking oil like crazy. Her parking area in the driveway would have to be pressure-cleaned. She responded to my concern about that by sending message after message, long epistles that detailed her childhood sexual abuse, the unfairness of the custody battle, the shallow aspect of life in general, as lived by people other than the free-spirited types. And finally, after I hadn't responded to those, a real chiller of a message detailing my abject standing as a decent human being.
Only one more day to go, I thought, though I did plan to register a complaint against her as soon as the oil-leaker rumbled out of the driveway.
She worked throughout the last night and morning hauling her boxes of doodads back to the vehicle. Quite a bit of junk was left in the apartment, as well as a filled heavy-duty leaf bag of souring remnants of fast-food meals. Many of my things were missing-- forks from the matching silver service set, the kitchen-scissors from set of knives in the butcher-block holder, books from the bookshelf, matching towels from the bath. The embroidered kitchen towels were stained badly. The bed cover had a blotch of some sort of glue. The frig was full of leftover food. The interior of the microwave was splattered with what appeared to be a combination of spaghetti sauce and meat fat. The exterior patio grill was covered with grease from the guy friend's go at making hamburgers.
I've communicated with the dispute department at airbnb, and initially, it looked like this guest would be banned from the service. There were a few overt threats in her messages to me. As well as plentiful evidence of emotional instability. But yesterday one of the leaders of the dispute department called to let me know that this guest is still allowed to write a review of her stay here. Of course, I would be allowed to dispute a negative review, if it turned out to be so.
For the life of me, I can't understand that reasoning. And it sounded like the ban, which we had discussed earlier, was now simply a figment of my imagination. The guest was still being referred to as an airbnb guest, with the full rights of normal guests. "But she isn't normal," I pointed out. "You've read her messages. How can anyone consider them 'normal'? Nevermind the damage she'd done to my property.
This morning I received a message from the dispute department. The case is now closed. All I can do is pray that this woman doesn't take up her poison pen again and trash me as a host, for prospective guests to read.
If any of you have the least idea of what I can do from here, please let me know.
Thank you,
Beth McKee
Grand Junction, CO
Beth McKee