Hi all, I have 2 recent incidents where you will see the irony. What will you do in these situation?
Case 1:
I have a guest booking for a private room for 1 guest. But he mentioned he will stay to celebrate birthday. So I asked him, how many guests will there be? He said he invited 15 guests and only 2 will stay. This is outright breaking the rules. But my entire apartment has 4 rooms which can accommodate up to 16 guests. So after the conversation, I offered to change the number of guests to "15" and for "entire apartment" in the booking, and for which extra charge will be involved. He accepted the change request but without realizing that he has to pay for extra. Once he realized that his card was charged extra for accepting the change request, he started throwing all the insulting words and said he will complaint and dropped bad reviews on me. Then guess what, next I received an email from airbnb saying that there is
Problem collecting payment for reservation
which basically means the guests do not have enough money on the card he used for payment in airbnb. So I called airbnb customer service. The airbnb case manager told me that the change request is now official, with or without the payment. And since the first payment (for 1 guest and 1 private room) is successful, the booking won't be automatically cancelled by airbnb even without them paying in full as well. And I can't refuse entry for all the 15 guests if I choose to proceed with the booking. So I have 2 options:-
1. cancel the guests as a host (Basically refunded all their previous payment) -- Airbnb would waive my penalty as a host, but that's like an "of course"?!
2. host all the 15 guests in the entire apartment for the price of 1 guest and 1 private room.
Of course you will choose option 1 in this case.
Now taking into this as a lesson learnt, here comes case 2
Case 2:
Yesterday, I had 1 guest checking in to another private room in my apartment. Again, the booking says "1 guest" and "1 private room". Then 7 of them appeared but in different time. The guest who booked didn't read that it's a private room and just assume it to be for the entire apartment. And he knew that the room can accommodate up to 6 guests but it would cost extra for extra guests. So he purposely just put 1 in the guest list. And he appeared first, thinking to sneaked in another 6 family members later after the check-in is done. But guess what, my cohost lives in the same apartment that night and so basically they can't do all the sneak-ins. Having no choice, they asked my co-host how much extra to pay for the extra guests. My cohost collected the extra payment in cash from them and prepared extra bedroom for the extra guests. Later, they msg me on airbnb expressing their unhappiness that we charged them extra. Basically pushing all the blame to us as a host to charge extra for extra guests and threaten to my cohost today that they are going to put bad reviews on my listing.
It's sad isn't it? For us as a host to be under constant threat from the guests who are trying to break the rules and use the reviews to threaten us. I knew airbnb wouldn't help, but I was trying my luck to call airbnb and asked if this can be documented and if they put bad reviews, is there anything they can do about it?
Instead of helping me on the review documentation part, which the case manager said there is nothing he can do. To my surprise, the case manager, said that I shouldn't have collected the extra money from the guests!!! He said that this is called dealing outside of airbnb and could be flagged by security team. Then I asked, would you collect for me then? He said "I could try but I can't guarantee that the guests would pay. And if they don't response to my payment request, there is nothing I can do about it". What?! So basically what he said is
1. I shouldn't collect the cash on my own. Let them do it
2. But if they fail to collect the money, it's not their problem and I can't hold it against them.
He even suggested that I shouldn't collect extra payment and should just let 7 of them stay since extra guests fee is not indicated in this reservation. Which is like.. duh?! Of course it wouldn't reflect in this booking because the guest did not put extra guest where he should!
Alright, so anyone encounter similar situations as above? What should we do if the guest brings extra guests? We are now in a dilema it seems.
Bottomline, according to airbnb's policy
1. The right thing to do is for us to send a change request as a host. But if we change the number of the guests, the guest accept but didn't pay where they should, we have no payment and we are left with the option to either host all the guests at the original rate, or cancel (And lose all their original payment) --> Refer to case 1
2. If we collect cash from the guest, we are considered breaking airbnb's rule and guest can complaint on us. (refer to case 2)
Both cases were extreme. Hopefully some experienced hosts will share their experience if they have encountered similar situation before. What should we do as a host?!