Guest violated internet usage rule

[Seema40]

Hi everyone,

we are new to Airbnb and have just had our second guest and her party of 8 including herself leave after a 4 night stay. 

she mentioned during her stay that they are enjoying the stay very much. There was no other queries or concerns from their end.

However we were alerted and received a warning by our internet provider that we were violating international copyright policies as  someone was downloading the new matrix movie illegally through bit torrent. 

this kind of violations carry a huge fine running into thousands of dollars and repeat offenders can also get prosecuted.

As soon as we received this notification, we send a polite but firm message providing proof through Airbnb messaging to the guest and informed them that we are suspending the internet for the remainder of the stay (for about 5 hours) as they were leaving in a few hours. The guest did not acknowledge this. 

they did leave the place very clean and tidy and we do know that it is one of her teen kids that did this . 

I don’t want to leave her a bad review but I don’t want them to give us a bad review because of this either.

any suggestions on how to handle this?

many thanks,
Seema 

[M199]

@Seema40 

Document everthing to cover your backside. The booking guest is responsible for the actions of their  party.

[Sarah977]

@Seema40  You have no control over what sort of review the guest leaves, and the review you write has no bearing on that- reviews are blind, the guest can't see your review until both reviews are published. 

Just leave an honest review mentioning the fact that they left the place very clean and tidy, and that aside from you getting a warning from your internet provider that someone in the house was illegally downloading copyrighted material, who turned out to be their teenager, they were fine guests.

I don't know that I would have turned off their internet access- I would have just told them about the notification and warned them to make sure no one in their group did this again. 

Shutting off listed utilities or amenities during an active booking is something guests could report you to Airbnb for and which they could then suspend your listing for, before asking for your side of the story.

[Seema40]

Thank you Sarah. The only reason we turned it off was they were trying to download something else again that was a violation and we didn’t really have much of a choice. We would have ended up with a $5400 USD FINE. 

we did mention this in our message to the guest. 

thank you for your info an gunsight. Much appreciated. 

we checked to see and the guest hasn’t checked her messages yet. Thanks for letting me know about the two way review process 

[Sarah977]

@Seema40  Oh, that's different, if they ignored the first warning and were doing it again. That's definitely a fine you don't want to get.

There's a strategy many hosts use if they suspect the guest might leave a bad review. (Guests who get called out for things during their stay do often retaliate by leaving a review full of complaints). 

Wait until 10 minutes before the 14 day review window is over to submit your review (have it all written and ready to go). By the time the guest has seen a notification that you've left a review, it will be too late for them to submit one.

Of course, this strategy only works if the guest hasn't already left a review. If they have, there's no point in waiting to submit yours. All reviews are published, regardless of whether both parties have reviewed or not. So you can't avoid a possible bad review by not leaving  one yourself. 

If only one party leaves a review, it will be published at 14 days. If both parties submit reviews before that time, they get published right away.

The 14 days is counted from the exact time you receive a notification to leave a review. There should be a countdown timer by your message stream with a guest on the 14th day that tells yoou exactly how much time you have left.

I'm curious-what  did you message the guest about after they left? They already knew they had done illegal downloading. What was there to say after the fact?