Hosting Fears: Do guests trash the house?

This is quite a fear at first.. You spend all the time, money and energy to setup your place and you wonder how will your guests treat it.

In my experience, the answer is no, our guests do not trash the house. In fact, they are generally remarkably clean.

They do not leave our place like most people would leave a hotel room.

Here are some reasons that, in my opinion, help support this phenomena.

We’ve stayed at some decent hotels in our life, but we keep our place cleaner than any hotel we’ve ever stayed. When you have a high standard, people will notice and it affects how they treat your place.

Another reason is, our guests are very nice about the requirement that they offer the purpose of their stay and who will be staying as guests. This allows you to screen your guests, but in reality they are prescreening themselves. As a host, you get to know them as real people, whether professionals or otherwise, and you get an opportunity to develop that connection.

Moreover, unlike a hotel, a BNB can set several “ground rules” that you would never see at a hotel. Hotels do have smoking and non-smoking rooms, so we choose to have a no-smoking rule as part of our list among others.

Our guests know that they are staying in somebody’s home, in our case, they know that we didn’t just buy our place only to rent it as a BNB, and they are paying for that privilege (though it’s less expensive than a comparable hotel room in the area). Even though we accommodate both domestic and an international guests, we find them to be rather amazingly courteous and clean. We’ve had to do some mild educating of some young single male engineers (LOL), but they took it with good grace and were fine guests.

We, my wife and I, are quite pleased, even surprised, that even families with young children have been remarkably responsible with the general tidying of the house.

Sometimes a few dirty dishes are either left our or left in the running dishwasher, but we take this into account with our cleanup.

In our experience, guests who tend to leave without paying as close attention to cleaning are the ones who book at the spur of the moment, meaning the same day. As extraordinarily rare as this may be, you may need to be wary of guests who want to book for a place to crash for one night after a party… it’s likely they will be having that party at your place.

Although it is comforting to see a guest making a reservation having already earned several previous good reviews (airbnb), in general, the new guests are pretty attentive to being good guests.

I cannot speak for other hosts, but I write a lot of information for prospective guests to read about our place in our listing. I write about what we hope and expect. You’d think it might scare some people away (maybe it does), but, assuming they actually read how we care about the house and have a bunch of rules, our guests seem more than willing to do a decent job of being careful and considerate. Judging by our reviews, works out well so far!

CKY

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