If you have carefully prepared, set up, and photographed your home, it won't take long for someone to contact you. Be ready and prepared. Guests don't choose you and your home, you choose them.
Avoid instant booking. Maintain control. If a tourist doesn't like you, because you perceived an arrogant or surly attitude or whatever, decline the reservation: select your guests carefully and thoughtfully.
You will have to be as cunning as a fox, but as honest as a butterfly. Without much fuss, you will host individuals of the human race. Beautiful, ugly, lame, honest, ignorant, educated, bully, filthy. Each of them will sediment something within you.
Your best friend will say, "You didn't know what was going to happen when you conjugated the verb "rent," did you?"
You will have to deal with setbacks, contrarieties and mishaps. You will have to understand, to dialogue, to offer the word to the other person's silence.
A lot of things will happen, there will be a lot of discoveries, a lot of achievements, a few holes in the water and many experiments in happiness.
Airbnb, tearing you away from your carefully cultivated sapient independence, will nag you, will seduce every day to make indecent downward proposals. Don't give in to his flattery. Tell him things are not that simple, tell him you will lower your price the day he lowers his transaction fees..
Your best friend will say, "You are the one renting out your apartment, not the manager of a booking website, okay!"
If you entrust Mr. Airbnb with your home, he will mingle with your life, tracking you, turning you into data managed by an algorithm that will soon become your new employer: you will be "profiled," judged in the present for any mistakes made in the past.
Your home will be reviewed, catalogued, arranged among many others who have surrendered the secret of their uniqueness to others, because the tourist you host will become a reviewer, an influencer, a podcaster, a member of a community like you.
You will then experience performance phobia. Your score will go up and down. You will have to battle with other cyberenters, evolved, sophisticated, fierce like you. Don't rely on buena suerte. Revenue strategies will show you the course to face all winds and tides, and how to fish methodically on a sea full of fish.
With every booking you'll get excited, with every cancellation you'll get depressed, in short, you'll become cyclothymic.
Your best friend will say, "What did you think would be easy?"
You'll be wrong, you'll be upset, but after having gagged your best friend you'll start over again, you'll try better not to stay on the surface of things, but to go deeper and deeper and get better and better at making your offer, because you have to make people fall in love with you and prefer your home among so many others.
This will be the secret pact with hosting that you will honestly honor.