Family can be the worst guests....

[Laura2592]

This is all my fault.

I allowed my husband's family to use our cottage for a long weekend. It was 7 hours of clean up to include:

- a dirty diaper (pull up?) under the bed

- a broken mirror which will require an entire vanity be replaced

-broken wine glasses

-poo smeared on the wall by where the three year old slept

- peanut butter and/or jelly at child height on just about every surface which had dried and was attracting ants

- dog poo on the patio by the fire pit

Do you ever have family stay at your Airbnb space? We had done so many times without any issues. This group had not stayed with us before and will not be welcome back. Its clear they thought it was a free-for-all. I actually had to take the day off to get everything back in shape for the next paying guests. 

Any tips on how to create better boundaries with family stays in the future?

[Colleen253]

@Laura2592 Ugh. You can choose your guests, but you can’t choose your family. Going forward, how about “so sorry but we just have NO availability, we are soooo booked up….

[Marissa160]

@Laura2592  oh no!! I’m so sorry this happened to you! We have a family member that has asked for her extended family to come stay and I just say NO. They don’t take care of their own house, much less mine and they let their kids do whatever they want and don’t supervise. I don’t feel bad at all for saying no to them. 

[Kelly149]

@Laura2592 we have a friend that lets friends stay for free at their beach condo (it isn’t an ABB!) but she always tells them that they’ll need to clean it back to how it started OR pay her cleaning people their going rate to do it for them. 

sounds like these folks would have been difficult either way, but some $$ to the cleaners (or you) might have softened the blow

[Sally221]

Give your spouse the choice of asking for a HUGE cleaning deposit (10-15 K sounds about right) or telling his family member "NO!"  Plan on never attending a holiday celebration with these shabby folks & really, would you want to eat food cooked in their kitchen? I hope these yahoos were second cousins, not siblings.

[Lorna170]

@Laura2592   We occasionally have let friends or family stay in our properties.  However, each time I will tell them that they are going to have to pay the housekeeper X dollars (2 times her fee) because this is her income and she would otherwise have been paid by guests.  This works quite well -- they appreciate being able to "stay for free" but are less likely to leave an unholy mess for the housekeeper.  

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@Laura2592  I haven't experienced this with my own family, but they also know that we don't outsource the cleaning for our home.

Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to believe that if there's a housekeeper on the payroll, then anything goes when it comes to the mess - even if the scope of that mess is way beyond their pay grade. And even more common is the delusion that staying at someone's house for "free" has no negative cost to the host, in spite of all the cleaning, utility use, lost profit opportunity, and even damage. Whenever someone talks about offering their home to someone for free, I think about how what they're really doing is paying them out of pocket to occupy the home.

I wouldn't charge relatives a rental fee if they were coming to visit me in my own home, but if they are availing themselves of your place of business I think it's perfectly fair to treat them as customers and set the same prices and rules you have for your normal guests. They are free, of course, to avoid the entanglements of family and business by staying elsewhere when they visit your area - which clearly would have been the better choice in this case.

[Kelly149]

@Anonymous I don’t (usually) outsource cleaning, but guests or family don’t need to know that. “The cleaning lady must be paid” is somehow much more tolerable for some reason than “i don’t want to  clean up after you for free”

[Anonymous]

@Kelly149  Ha! Here, I almost reached for the first line of Anna Karenina but thought better of it 🙂

[Helen3]

With a whole listing I would only provide free stays for close family/friends I knew well.

Anyone else can have a discount depending on the time of year and need to pay cleaning costs. Sadly someone only seem to value/look after things when they are paying for them 🙂 @Laura2592 

In this case just let these 'guests' know you needed to get a professional cleaning service in after their stay because of the amount of cleaning required and are sending them the bill  as you know they wouldn't want you to be out of pocket by having to cover this cost for them.

Quite honestly if it was my family member I would have called them and read them the riot act - completely disrespectful - the least they can do is pay for a day of your time at commercial cleaning rates.