All Forum Posts by: Sean Wilt

@Luke Carl, @Robert Purcell

Lucas, Yeah, I did leave a nice response and moved on as you said.  Life is too short I suppose to get too caught up in it.  I was thinking I might send a private note to "educate" the guest though.  she just joined AirBnb in February when she booked my space and had no reviews so this was likely her first experience and maybe just didn't understand.

Robert, will definitely do that more religiously now.  I have in the past writen something similar, but will do it all the time now.  And, Will do it the morning of check out so they get my note before they get the AirBnb notification to write us a review.

Thanks all.... I wasn't looking for a silver bullet on how to fix, just wanted to vent to like minded peeps.

@Share Ross

I didn't think you could update it once it's published???

We are off to a great start on our new rental.  9 reviews to date and ALL 5 star wtih glowing comments.  Just had our 10th guest this year and they wrote publicly and privately very nice and complimentary descriptions of their stay.  gave 5 stars on all sub categories (on AirBnb) except "location" which was 4 star.  Cleanliness, communication, value, etc. all 5 star.

But they gave the over all rating as 4 star.  

Likely not much I can do, and sure some people just have a thing about not giving 5 stars, but man that hurts.  We are still at 4.9 over all but one more 4 star and we could jeopardize Super Host status which we will qualify for on the April 1st review barring no more 4 stars.

Frustrated.

@Alexander Krasne

Check out AirDNA.  (Airdna.co) They have 3 years of monthly history showing number of listings, revenue trends, occupancy trends, etc.  That should give you an idea if the market as a whole is slowing or if as mentioned above, it may just be time of year or issues with your specific listing (pricing, etc.).  check out this graph below. It shows revenue trends over time.  Lots of other cool analysis too.  Bet you could purchase Asheville data for $50 or so for a month to take a deep dive.

If you have Smart TVs, you can get YouTubeTV. It works great, gets 40+ channels including local news, espn, etc. and it's only $38/month.  We do that.  We pay Xfinnity $72/month for high spead internet, plus $38/month for YouTubeTV and that is it for all TVs in the house.

I think it's important to give people the option to watch the "big game" on TV.  If you are a Cowboy fan and have to go to the bar to watch, that would be aggravating.

AirDNA has a platform called Investment Explorer that does just that.  There is a fee but it's pretty cool in my opinion.  They demo Nashville on their for free so you can check it out.

Once you decide on a market you can purchase their Market Minder tool at the market level and it does a deep dive.

Patrick, looks like a pretty harmless group to me.  No smoking and drinking, etc.  Looks like that eliminates most of the risk of a party.

Sure, they may have some folds over during the day, but doubtful they would stay over night.  even if they did, likley no harm at least as I see it.

Take the booking and get a great review, pocket the cash and move on.  Important thing in the beginning is to accumulate stays and get great reviews.

My two cents. 

Good luck!

@Julie McCoy

Julie, yep, that's what I did... wrote a positive review in my commentary, gave them 5 stars on communication etc. but 4 stars on cleanliness so all in all they can't be upset with their review.

Thanks again all.

BTW, Julie, both your stories in your post sound like nightmares.  Cross my fingers I don't have any of those yet (though I'm sure I will at some point!)

Happy New Year all!

All, thanks for the responses.  I totally get it and actually just got off the phone with our cleaning person.  She is new at the vacation biz cleaning thing but is doing a GREAT job.  I agree with each of you and after speaking with her, I think she was a bit too hard in her description.

I explained that smoking, dog crap on the floor, broken item, etc. are grounds for bad review.  She understood and I feel good about the 5 star beacause as mentioned, they really were good guests other than the tooth paste!  :)

Thanks again!

How tough are y'all non guests that leave the home a bit of a mess?  We've rented our personal residence out a number of times and each time the home has been pretty spotless on our return.  We just purchased a full time rental at the beach though and we have just finished our third guest.  Seems like these guests have been not quite so considerate.  Perhaps as they know it's a full time rental vs. our personal home?

Anyway, our cleaning lady just sent me a note ranking the last guests as a 6 of 10.  toothpaste spit all over the bathroom faucets, and some sort of substance -- guessing food smeared all over the bathroom counter. They also removed a picture from the wall in one of the bedrooms and set it on the floor.

My question is, this does not seem TOOO bad, but would you rate this a 5 star?  I know on AirBnb, they won't see our review until they post theirs so no real worry that a bad reveiw would bias their review of us.  Their communication was good througout and all in all, had been good guests.  I'm surprised at the condition they left the home.

What do you think?