New Host, Difficult Guests

[Katelyn79]

Hi All,

We are new to hosting on airbnb, just made our listing available in December 2021. We just host part time, and have had about 10 guests so far. Some of them have been great, but some have been not so great…

The biggest issue we have encountered is that we had a guest stay for one night in our suite which is non-smoking. We have this rule in our listing, in the House Manual, as well as in print format in the suite. Our manual clearly states that along with non-smoking, no cigarette butts are allowed on the property and no smell of smoke in the suite, and that breaking this rule will result in a fine of $50-$250 depending on severity.

The guest I am referring to left a cigarette butt INSIDE the suite. I could smell the smoke as soon as I entered to clean, and had to search to find where it was coming from and then discovered the butt. It took a lot of extra cleaning to remove the smell 😞

We contacted airbnb support that same day. The support worker advised us to make a claim of $50 for the break of rules. I expressed concerns that this would result in a bad review from an angry guest. The support worker assured me that the guest had already submitted their review and it could not be altered, so I had nothing to worry about. 

I followed the advice and submitted the claim. The guest refused to pay. The next day we got notification of a review. It was from this guest leaving 1 star and ranting about how unreasonable we are. 

We have spent hours on the phone with airbnb support since and spoke to many different workers including managers. They refuse to remove the review.

As a result of this terrible review, our ratings are lower than anywhere else I can see in our city. Our listing was even suspended my airbnb for the low rating average. 

This is the worst example. We have also had other guests leave 3-4 star reviews either without any negative comments (so we don’t know what went wrong) or with comments that are not accurate to our suite… 

I am feeling pretty discouraged about all of this and have no idea how we are going to get bookings and increase our ratings. I don’t know how we can avoid having guests like this that break our rules and/or write reviews that are inaccurate. 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! We really want to keep this going but its been a rough first month. 

Thanks!

[Katelyn79]

@Elaine701 Thanks for your input. I will, in the future, be leaving my comments in my review rather than confronting the guest, because like you said, it's me who lost in this situation. It just sucks because I feel like it's kind of an underhanded way of dealing with issues, but as you mentioned, it is the only way I can see to protect myself. I've decided that I won't be using the AirBnB support/claim centre unless it is severe damage that I can not afford to fix on my own. When I signed up to host I felt so secure reading through all the ways AirBnB claims to protect hosts, it is just disappointing to experience the opposite. Thanks for your help!

[Huma0]

@Katelyn79 

Good response to the review, which is already now quite low down in your reviews and will eventually be buried under the other, positive ones.

The one issue with leaving responses though is that it draws attention to that negative review when future guests might have not noticed it otherwise. I would suggest that in future, you write nice responses to all (or at least most) of your reviews, not just respond to the negative one. 

This not only avoids highlighting that one negative review, but guests seem to like it. I had one recent guest who told me the main reason she booked was because she liked the nice responses I left for other guests.

[Katelyn79]

@Huma0  Good tip, I didn't think of that. I will try to respond to every review in the future, and I may go back and respond to the recent ones as well. Thanks!

[Sarah977]

@Katelyn79  I have never left a review response (and luckily never gotten a bad or misleading review). While it does look good to future guests, as Huma said, I have noticed when looking at the responses left by long-standing hosts that they often started out leaving those nice, appreciative responses to all the good reviews, but over time stopped doing so. I guess they got tired of it after awhile, especially if they get only short bookings, so high turnover, and maybe more than one listing. 

If you get longer bookings, it wouldn't seem so much like an added chore, but I can understand why hosts who get 100 reviews a year wouldn't bother.

[Thomas2696]

I too am new and after three guests, I had one who gave me three stars after making a mess of my home. I want to know if there is a way we can contact other hosts that a future guest may have already used to get real feed back. I am noticing that the review system is flawed. There has to be a better way.

[Sarah977]

@Thomas2696  The only way to do that is either to check whether that host might have a direct booking website and contact them through that website, or to send them an Inquiry message. 

Some hosts might be annoyed to receive an Inquiry that has nothing to do with an Airbnb booking, as it obligates them to respond within 24 hours, but personally I would not be bothered by it. If the host is too busy to answer you fully, they can always just send you a reply saying "Busy right now- will get back to you on this this evening."

And it isn't something you should make a habit of for every booking, but only the ones that throw up red flags and whose past reviews lead you to suspect something and want more clarification if the review was non-committal.