REVIEWS REALLY DON'T PROVIDE INSIGHTS ON BAD GUESTS

[Priscilla22]

I just finished hosting a stay with a very bad guest. He smoked in my home and lied about it, when through my pantry and ate my food, drank my beer without even bothering to ask. I have a no shoes in the house policy and he simply ignored it. He stole my community parking pass which requires a police report to replace. When I asked him if he was helping himself to my food/drinks he then proceeded to become irrate, proclaiming that he has stayed in hundreds of Airbnbs and hosts alway accomodate guests helping themselves to their pantries/refigerators.  He even went as far to accuse me of entering his room and taking money, then accusing the housekeeper when he previously told me he was home the whole time she was cleaning. I've had my housekeeper for over a year with no issues before this bad guest. In the end I had to call the police for him to finally leave the property. My neighbors even called to ensure everything was safe in my home. Although this situation has been resolved with Airbnb, for the safety of hosts, we need to be more preventative rather than reactive!

Having stayed at so many Airbnb's I would expect him to have more than 2 reviews from January 2015 and October 2015. I believe we can better protect hosts if they can submit guest reviews without fear of retribution on the affect of our own listings. We should have the ability to submit a true and honest account of guests that do not adhere to house rules and make us feel uncomfortable! In order to avoid one off events, if a guest has a number of hosts with complaints, the information should be relayed to future hosts so that they may use their descrection when opening their HOME to guests.   This experience really has made me rethink whether or not I want to continue hosting! Although I have never had any issues in the past. This was an extremely stressful experience.

[Helen3]

I wouldn't @Cormac0 that doesn't actually make sense in English 🙂 (I do appreciate English isn't your first language.

@Priscilla22 I am so sorry you had this experience. And yes it is so frustrating when other hosts don't help each other by leaving honest reviews. Personally I hate the phrase ' would be better staying in a hotel' as it tells us little.

Next time, you have a situation like this, take control early on and speak to the guest and follow up by a message via Airbnb, then if he continues to behave badly you can speak to Airbnb to cancel his booking and ask him to leave. I very much doubt that other hosts were happy for him to steal their food and drink.

Flag his profile and ask Airbnb if they are going to cancel his profile.

[Priscilla22]

Thank you Helen for the advise. I will definately ask about the smoking on Airbnb's messaging system rather than in person from now on and request a cancellation if it continues. I did allow it to continue for too long as this was my FIRST bad experience with a guest. I did flag his profile so hopefully this helps 🙂

[Veronika25]

Hi Priscilla and all other Hosts!

I think the absence of the real reviews enables bad guest keep coming to our homes. I just had a bad guest in my place. I wrote an honest review about her. And now, after she had changed her name, profile and picture she started writing offensive, hateful messages to me.

I flagged her messages for now.

Thank you for reading

[Janet144]

I have just had my first negative experience and understand exactly where you are coming from. I, too, give them the benefit of the doubt - too trusting. My guest signed on as 1 occupant, arrived with 2 other men and a mother who didn't speak English. She did some cleaning, laundry, etc. so when they asked to extend for 3 days (not on AirBnB) to finish details on a place to rent for a year, I agreed and wrote my review at the original date of the reservation. The place was like Motel 6 when I went in - food all over the kitchen counter - in the frig - unwrapped, and worst of all, items missing. Old teaspoons and a cast iron skillet that were my grandmother's, the Foreman grill, mop, and little old blue glass rooster and mug ...interesting that they had commented on the 'homey environment' and asked if I didn't worry about my things. I responded that I hoped the caliber of guest I would get would not do that...such a feeling of being taken advantage of! And, yes, it makes one re-think this experience. But I don't want to give one guest the power to take away what has been positive otherwise. Takes a lot of self-talk!!

[Bruce43]

@Janet144 i would have to agree with you i have had about 10 guests since i have opened my apt next door.my own version of faulty towers.i have had only 1 guest with his 2 older kids who must have been driving him nuts all day.to make a long story short i stopped one nighters and instabook as i dont have the time to deal with it.so far it has been fun and rewarding for me.by the way i lived in your town also boulder and manitou springs in the 70's 

[Janet144]

HI Bruce, I appreciate your time to reply and maybe Instabooking is not a great idea...and the single night. I have only had 1 person stay just 1 night. I do not want this to influence my attitude to the process! I know it is not the norm. I did find the old frying pan...I need to let him know, but things were put away 'helter skelter' and I am such a creature of habit! Everything goes back exactly where it came from. If he needed the Foreman grill and mop that bad, I hope they enjoy using them! 

You would not know this town now, from the 70's. Way too big and city-like now. But the mountains still add a charm! I would love to visit Israel sometime! Maybe our paths will cross.

[Andrea9]

@Janet144

What terrible guests and an awful experience for you. Good that you are still positive about it.

Maybe you already did this for that booking, but for the future, if you see that somebody arrive with more than they booked for you can take recourse this way:

https://community.airbnb.com/t5/Community-Help/Do-I-pay-the-100-penalty-if-a-booking-is-made-for-one...

https://community.airbnb.com/t5/Hosts/Change-Price-Number-of-Guests-Check-in-or-Check-out-Dates-A/m-...

https://community.airbnb.com/t5/forums/v3_1/forumtopicpage/board-id/listing-and-reservations/thread-...

(the thread has become quite long, yet also gives a good idea of how to handle things)

https://community.airbnb.com/t5/forums/v3_1/forumtopicpage/board-id/listing-and-reservations/thread-...

Always talk to the guests about arriving with unbooked  persons/dogs etc.

Important though is at least recapping a verbal conversation (any non-online convo) on the message page. It's proof of evidence to Airbnb.

Also enforce House Rules:

Only booked and registered persons are allowed on property. ID check upon arrival.

(People knowing their ID is checked and made a note of is also a bit extra protection for you. They know you have their data and could go to the police. I am so glad that my city requests hosts to keep a kind of 'hotel register' for guests. Seemed a bit invasive to me at first, but is one of the best security safekeeps in hosting.)

[Leslie0]

Never extend a booking outside the Airbnb platform. A friend of mine did that, a new host. The woman whom she had grown to trust made up some story about not having a credit card, could she pay in cash. When my friend returned home from work, all her electronics had been stolen plus her notebook with her passwords. It was a nightmare. Because the booking had been done outside of the Airbnb platform, there was nothing Airbnb could do for her. Her insurance covered the electronics, but the passwords turned into a nightmare because they were used to divert her checks into the thieves account. I believe there are con artists lurking who prey on new hosts so beware.

[Cormac0]

@Helen3

English is my first language but dyslexia is my condition, 

Black balled definition:

To exclude somebody from a club by secret ballot which usual involed using white and black balls.

[Helen3]

Apologies @Cormac0

I thought from where you live that English wasn't your first language. Apologies.

I know what 'black balled' means. However,  what you actually wrote was blackED balled 🙂

[Cynthia110]

I agree with @Cormac0.  Somehow, they need to be black balled.  

Cynthia Ramsay

Wimberley, Texas

[Bruce43]

@Cormac0 you would think having to use a photo id check it would be picked up.

in fact it has to be a red signal as big as the moon

i suppose its up to us hosts to weed out the *jerks*

[Annette33]

@Priscilla22 , right on! It is one of my pet peeves that neither hosts nor guests can actually trust reviews or get significant insights from them, the m.o. is to make nice- nice at all times. So hurray for people who leave honest reviews!

Too bad Airbnb is either incapable or uninterested in weeding out truly bad guests or hosts - they exist on both sides of  the fence! As it is, when you write your review, guests are also getting rated these days, that is just for Airbnb's eyes, and in the end, they ask you to give thumbs up or thumbs down for the guest you  are reviewing.That's a start!

As for the public review: by all means, please do it - just stay short, unemotional, but the message to future hosts is loud and clear if you just say something like , " hosting ....... was extremely stressful, I have never had a guest where I had to call the police to have the guest removed from the property". 

Don't give up,on hosting yet, this was hopefully the worst you'll ever encounter..

[Tim-and-Holly0]

Yes, don't give up on hosting over one bad apple. We have hosted about 500 people and can count on one hand the bad guests and out of the handful only one really bad guest worth losing sleep over. Had we quit hosting because of one or two bad people we would have missed meeting some really great people. 

We left reviews for each bad guest so future hosts would be warned. There is no reason to play the "nice" game since the guest cannot see your review before they write theirs and you will not allow the guest to return to your house anyway. If they do leave you a bad review, as others in this post have said, simply respond with a very professional response and go on. One bad review that is followed up by a professional response out of dozens of good reviews  will not hurt you. Hosts are hurt by an accumulation of bad reviews. Hosts are also hurt by hosting bad guests that previous hosts did not review properly as was the case with the really horrible guest we had.

Don't let it get you down. Learn from it and move on. Here's to happy hosting for years to come!

[Emily145]

I do think the major flaw in the review system is what @Cynthia&Chris said, that as hosts we need to have positive reviews so we can't just cancel our profile and wipe the slate clean if we get a bad one. But guests only need an absence of negative reviews so they can just cancel and open a new account if they get a bad review.

There needs to be more done to prevent guests from opening and closing multiple accounts to evade the review system. I'm sure it can never be stopped entirely but you can make it difficult enough to cut down on most of it. Require a Drivers License or ID # of some kind that can't be used to set up a new account if it's been used before. Or a phone number they have to verify ownership of through a text message - not many people will go to the trouble of getting a new phone line just to start a new AirBnB account. Or if not requiring these things, strongly encourage them and penalize guests who don't provide them with a prominent "ID NOT VERIFIED" warning on their profile and warning messages to them advising that many hosts will not want to accept a guest without verified ID.

Don't make identity verification look like a nice extra thing a guest can do - it should be viewed as a minimum safety standard to protect hosts and guests should be made to understand what a huge safety and security risk a host would be taking to let them into their home with no idea who they are.