This year has been weird. I’ve spent a lot of time feeling out of place. Last year was dominated by a pandemic that was supposed to have finished by this summer. It wasn’t, and I wasn’t ready for it. Here are some of the things I’ve learned from hosting – and not hosting – the last year.
We’ve hosted on Airbnb since 2016. Some years a lot, some years less. It’s all been great fun, making lots of new friends and learning how to welcome strangers into our home.
We live in a tiny village in Northern Denmark, in a big old farmhouse (150 years old, big, big garden and grounds, though no active farming). We host Airbnb as much as we can manage, participate actively in the local village community, have two small girls (5 & 6), and two senior management jobs.
We can all agree that last year (2020) was weird. In Airbnb terms, we didn’t get the usual guests (Norwegians traveling to the ferry, Americans looking for their roots, Dutch people wanting to see Northern Denmark…), but lots of Danish people who couldn’t go abroad and who wanted to see their own country. We didn’t go anywhere, either, so we had the whole summer at home to just do nothing. It was lovely. We built a playhouse for the kids and had barbecues with our Airbnb guests.
But this year (2021) has been weirder. Everyone was hoping to go abroad, so Danish people didn’t book travels in Denmark. The people outside Denmark couldn’t plan to come to Denmark either, so we had neither Danes nor foreigners booking and what looked to become a very quiet season. We were ourselves hoping to go abroad, so we had our listing closed in the main holiday weeks in the hope of maybe maybe maybe being able to visit my parents in Norway.
So when the season started we had no bookings, no travel plans, and everything was up in the air. I was a bit discouraged. I didn’t’ sit down and meditate over it, because – as we say in Norwegian – I have too many ants in my butt to ever sit down quietly – but I did my kind of meditation. This means I took my shovel and spade, left my phone and social media indoors, and went out into the garden to spend some time inside my own head while gardening.
Be honest with yourself and what you can reasonably handle
I was annoyed that we had so few bookings, on the other hand, I’d myself closed down our listing. But you know, we humans, we’re not always rational. Life and everything felt up in the air. We didn’t know if we could travel or not. Work was busier than ever. And with everything feeling out of place, I had exactly the number of bookings I was ready to handle this summer - zero. And once I opened the listing, bookings started trickling in.
We’re not a hotel – we’re us!
Of course, we all want our listings to be pretty and comfortable and Instagram-ready. In real life, I host in an old farmhouse with big spiders and old floors that sometimes feature small pools of water I have no idea where it came from. I call it “vintage farmhouse” in our listing. I make sure it's clean, I remove the spiders I can see, and warn guests that “Here Be Spiders (and sometimes mice)”.
Nothing isn’t bad
Nothing happening is not a bad thing. We had no school stress during lockdown as both our kids are pre-school. I worked from home, my kids played or watched TV. But mostly, for my kids, lockdown meant lots more parent and sibling quality time, no stress, and parents being a lot more present than before. And this is how the summer continued, and that’s how I want the rest of the year to continue. Not with nothing happening, but appreciating what we have, being present with my kids, accepting what is – spiders and all - and not taking on more than I can handle.
