I recently hosted a guest who was over 1 1/2 hours late checking out. I have not left a review for her yet (still have a week to do that), so just thought I would seek the opinion of others before I did so.
Initial communication with the guest (before arrival) was a bit hit and miss as I asked for an approximate arrival time which she said she would provide the next day (but did not), but she then made up for that by providing good updates on arrival time on the day they arrived (including phoning me when she was 10 or 15 minutes away).
Checkout time is 11am and my rental property is about 1 1/2 hours drive from my home, so I left home around 10am to go to the property to prepare for the next guests. I arrived there a few minutes after 11:30 and the guests were obviously still there. I had heard a message come in on my phone around 10:45 but had not checked it (as I was driving), so I checked my phone before approaching the house and found a message timestamped at 10:45am from the guest requesting late check-out at 1pm (which obviously I had not replied to).
I went a knocked on the door but the guest did not immediately answer (despite one of the guests obviously seeing me approach through the window). The door was not locked so I opened it slightly to call out to them and tell them that a late check-out was not ok. They were most apologetic and stated that the request for late check-out had been sent about an hour before the time I received it, and said they had assumed that late check-out was ok because I had not responded. This raises the question as to how reliable the airbnb timestamps are? My thought is that if the message is timestamped at 10:45am then that is the time that it was sent, but has anybody got an experience where there was a delay by airbnb in sending a message?
Even if the message was sent an hour earlier I would not expect a guest to interpret a lack of response as approval - if they wanted a quick response they could have phoned me to be certain I got the message (they had previously phoned me - so obviously had my number - and I would have answered the phone on hands free while driving even though I don't check messages while driving).
I did receive the guest's approval to start stripping the beds whilst they were still there, but I could only do 1 out of the 4 bedrooms as there were still people in the other rooms, so I ended up waiting outside the house for about an hour before I could start cleaning and preparing for the next guests.
The house was left pretty clean and tidy, so I don't have any major problems there (would give 5 out of 5 for cleaning - there were a couple of bits of something stuck to the carpet which required spot cleaning, but I have come to accept that sort of thing from families with young children and don't mark them down if the place is generally clean and tidy). Other than the late check-out the only other issue was that they had obviously placed a pan of boiling water on the lawn (the pan was still there when I arrived but was not hot - a circle of dead grass is the reason I believe it was boiling when placed there).
My thought is to leave a 'reasonable' review. I would mention the late check-out problem in the review and would mark them down on communication and house rules (I would consider check-out time in the house rule category). I would probably have approved a late check-out if they had asked in a timely manner, but their actions wasted an hour of my time (and yes, I did definitely have better things I could have been doing).
Any suggestions on how to approach a review would be appreciated, as would any observations on the accuracy of timestamps on airbnb messages.
The guest currently has 6 airbnb reviews with an overall rating of 4.5 (and 4.5 in every category). Obviously at least one host has given less than 5 previously, but none of the review texts mention any issue (in fact they are all glowing recommendations).
Thanks,
David