In the early years I never had any issues as guests were familiar with “home share” experiences and were extremely respectful but as time marches on more people use Airbnb as a cheap alternative to hostels this has become a frustrating and most difficult problem. I have hosted over 15,000 guests, (3 listings), since 2016 and it’s been my experience that currently only 25% of them bother to read the listing or the rules.
My first rule under “additional house rules”, in bold letters reads, Rule #1.) READ THIS LISTING BEFORE YOU BOOK” yet they still do not bother. As a result, they have no information as to when checkin begins, bathrooms are shared, where they can park, what the amenities include, where the ADU is located within the home etc. Even more aggravating, they will repeatedly argue, lie and say they read the listing. It takes all of 5 minutes to read everything but they will waste a day emailing all while boldly lying. Honestly at this stage I don’t want them as guests and either decline or cancel without penalty, (they broke rule #1).
To help weed rude guests out I added questions they need to answer in the introductory email. (Examples : Please confirm you are aware you will be sharing 2 bathrooms, Please provide the first name of your travel companion etc). The ones who simply refuse to read it and say they did are busted, (I absolutely know this because they don’t respond to my questions.) 30% of guests don’t even check their email so I have no way to communicate with them when they are requesting a reservation.
My solution has been to contact Airbnb Customer Care and ask them to reach out to the guest and tell them to check their Airbnb email thread, I explain that the guest has not read my listing description. Unfortunately this never is the case, for some reason the customer care person tries to help the guest avoid reading the listing which only complicates things and has often caused a much larger problem and the reservation is either declined or canceled without penalty. I can’t seem to get them to just have the guest read the listing and get back to me.
Recently I have found customer care “specialists” to cause more harm than good because they don’t follow simple requests themselves muddling things by injecting themselves into the process in order to enable the guest in ‘not’ reading the listing.
I feel it’s Airbnb responsibility to to educate new Airbnb Users that they have agreed, in the official Airbnb Agreements, to read a listing before they book it. We provide everything as hosts to keep Airbnb in business, without hosts there would be no Airbnb. Guests are always going to find a place to sleep, hotels, cruise ships VROB etc.
As I said earlier, in the beginning of my Airbnb hosting experience, guests were appreciative to have someone open up their home to them, it was a fun enriching experience. Guests understood home share and respected the culture.
Today guests are clearly not appreciative, don’t understand and therefore ill prepared to be involved in a “Home Share Community”. Neither the guest nor Airbnb customer care seem to understand we are sharing our most valuable asset with these strangers weather we live at the location or not,
One solution might be for Airbnb to send every new Airbnb member, in a private email, a questionnaire that incorporates important rules and facts and also guarantees they have read it the information by responding to the questionnaire before they allow them to book a reservation.
