Entitled Guests Who Make Me So Angry

[Lorna170]

Once again I have a guest who is ** demanding, entitled, uncaring and flagrantly disregarding all decent guest behavior and rules.

What is it with these guests?  I have no understanding of these behaviors.  I am a licensed property, maximum of 4 guests, room for 2 cars to park.  My current guest has 6 cars in the drive, multiple pets roaming about, and at least 8 people at the property.  WTF?  

When I initially vetted this young woman, 3 months ago, there were to be two guests and one pet, and she had very good reviews.  A week before arrival there was a request for 2 more guests and another pet.  The communication seemed very up front and pleasant.  What a LIAR this guest turned out to be.  I wont burden you with the number of idiotic requests she has made -- they are unbelievable.  My husband says let it be, she and her friends will be gone in the morning.  She will be getting a very poor review from me, and I will happily say that she should not be allowed to rent on AirBnB again.

**[Comment removed in line with the Airbnb Nondiscrimination Policy]

Title edited for readability - Stephanie

[Anonymous]

@Lorna170   I agree that demanding, entitled, and uncaring people occur in every age group. But what I do find some generationally specific tendencies when it comes to leverage. Specifically, each generation has a different concept of which privilege they can deploy to get what they want.

Young folks today have less wealth than their predecessors, so that doesn't tend to be how they throw their weight around. And while the old hierarchies of race, gender, and nationality haven't gone anywhere, people who grew up with social media are acutely aware of how perilous it can be to use those advantages as currency. So the ones who have entitled attitudes now have to be quite a lot more creative about how they appraise their social capital than their parents and grandparents, who could conveniently fall back on being ___ (white, heterosexual, wealthy, or whatever) without having to think much about it.

[Anonymous]

Dear moderators - I presume that the M-word was censored from @Lorna170 's post because someone found it ageist. Fair enough. But unfortunately, it's had the effect of making it look as though she said something much worse, like a racial slur.

See also:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AXPnH0C9UA

[Lorna170]

Thank you @Anonymous .  I can't believe they used asterisks to censor my descriptive term.  I may be cursing this guest, but would not do it in a public forum.  

[Anonymous]

@Lorna170 I can see how it might have merited an edit if you'd made a derogatory mention of the guests' ethnicity or sexual orientation, for example "Entitled Bisexuals Make Me Angry," or "Darn these entitled Michiganders!"  But as a millennial myself,  I've never been personally offended when someone points out a generationally-specific behavior that annoys them. Nobody is harder on millennials than other millennials.

There have been Problem Guest threads where hosts have described the guests more generally as "old," "young," or "children," which were not censored or portrayed as discriminatory. It tends to be a relevant detail for context - one recent thread about a guest stealing a chopping board described her as "elderly," which was relevant because the issue turned out to be dementia rather than criminality. But if "Millennial" is now considered an offensive term, I would think that "elderly" is even more so. 

[Suzanne302]

@Anonymous @Sarah977 No one said Millennial is an offensive word. But when you use a derogatory term to describe an entire population of people? That's offensive. We need to do better.

[Sarah977]

@Suzanne302  Aside from people who truly are prejudiced and view certain demographics as all the same, I think it's understood that generalizations are just that, and of course there are plenty of individuals within a demographic who don't behave anything like that. 

But if we pretend that every age group or other demographic doesn't tend to manifest certain characteristics or behaviors, in my opinion, that leads to less understanding, rather than more. 

When everyone you know in a certain demographic does something that those in other demographics don't, I do not see it as discrimination to discuss that. 

Like the millennial age guest who explained to me why people in her age group don't put everything they want to say in one text message, instead of sending a new text message for every sentence. Every person in her age demographic, in my personal experience, does that, so I asked her why and she explained. And while it used to really annoy me, once I had an understanding of the reason behind it, I ceased to be annoyed by it. And I would never have come up with that explanation on my own.

Had I asked her why she sends 6 text messages in a row, it might have sounded like a personal criticism or that I was irritated with her. In saying to her that every person I know in her age group does this, and that I would like some insight as to the reason, if she could provide it, she was able to explain ("we view texting as a form of talking rather than writing") and I was able to gain understanding and more tolerance.  

And she wasn't the least bit offended.

Parenting books divide advice for dealing with children into age groups. No one thinks that's discriminatory, because there are certain behaviors that are common to 2 year olds that aren't common to 5 year olds. If they wrote those books as if children of every age are the same and should be dealt with in the same way, those books would be useless.

That's no different from pointing out that certain behaviors are common among millennials that aren't common among GenZers or seniors.

Misplaced concepts of non-discrimination lead to things like Airbnb considering 0-2 years of age to be "infants", whereas a 3 month old baby, who does little more than smile, cry, make sounds, eat, sleep and fill their diapers, is nothing whatsover like a 2 year old who can climb up on chairs and pull things off the counters and scribble on the walls with crayons.

[Suzanne302]

@Sarah977So you believe "all" millenials are entitled? Okay, all boomers are a**holes and idiots. How does that work for you? Again, do better.

You can say millenials text differently or they have a certain way of communicating. Those aren't derogatory terms. But entitled is a derogatory term. That's the difference.

*Disclaimer: I do not believe all boomers are like that. For illustrative purposes only. Who are you to decide what characteristics define an entire generation? Sounds a bit elitist to me. And in case anyone is wondering, I'm not a millenial.

Sarah, DO BETTER.

[Sarah977]

@Suzanne302  I most certainly don't believe all millenials are entitled. Never said such a thing. I said certain demographics tend to share some common behaviors, but that doesn't mean they all do. 

But my observation is that yes, some demographics tend to exhibit entitled behaviors, more so than others. And yes, that might be considered deragatory. 

Quite frankly, I'm quite sick of political correctness, where we can't say anything anymore without someone taking offense and the speaker being accused of discrimination.

There is a very funny video, made by a Mexican-American comedian. The comments after the video were quite interesting. A whole lot of non-Mexicans jumping on the "discrimination"  accusation bandwagon, saying it was deragatory towards Mexicans.  In their knee-jerk zeal to label it as offensive, they entirely missed that it was made by a Mexican comedian, and they also completely missed the entire point the video was making, which was actually calling out the attitude of Americans who rant about "illegals" supposedly taking all their jobs.

[Helen744]

Helen@744 dont talk to Sarah like that jeez

[Helen744]

Helen@744. Never leave crayons or candles just saying H

[Sarah977]

@Lorna170 @Anonymous  I also find it bizarre that this is considered a discriminatory word by Airbnb. And I don't see it considered such anywhere else. It's a descriptor of generation. Boomers, GenXers, GenZers, Millennials, etc. 

[Helen744]

Helen@744 . Boomers is a huge insult here in Australia  H