In 2016, my husband and I listed the mother-in-law apartment in our basement on Airbnb. Since then, we’ve moved into the house next door, turned the upstairs of the old house into another short-term rental apartment, and hosted over 1,000 guests.
We love welcoming people into our home, and we’ve learned a lot from hosting over the years. While there’s only so much one can extrapolate about humanity from having a short-term rental, there’s also a lot we’ve learned about people that has surprised us.
1. The overwhelming majority of people are great
The first and most unexpected lesson we’ve learned is that most guests are kind, respectful, and leave the place in good shape. Unfortunately, the negativity bias of social media skews reality. People with complaints, both hosts and guests, share them online. People who have great experiences generally won’t.
Of the 1,000+ people we’ve hosted, I can count on one hand the number of truly problematic guests we’ve had. Yes, those experiences were bad. But that good-to-bad guest ratio has been a delightful surprise. It’s not even like it’s 90-10. It’s more like 99-1. It’s been a humanity-affirming experience.
2. You can tell who will be high maintenance from the get-go
Some people are high-needs, whether it’s due to having a finicky personality or genuine issues that require more from us as hosts than the average guest. Either way, we usually know from the first communication who is going to be high-maintenance, either during their stay or afterward.
If they ask lots of tiny detail questions in their initial inquiry, they’re likely going to be high-needs during their stay. If they ask for a discount before their stay, they’re going to be a worse-than-average guest. “Would you consider offering a discount, since we’re basically just going to sleep there?” is a red flag every time. (Spoiler: They’re not going to just sleep there. They will use every single towel and will probably bring an unsanctioned pet as well.)
3. When you offer quality and care, they are generally reciprocated
We take a lot of pride in providing a beautiful, comfortable space for our guests, and it shows. We have found that in return, people treat our space with the same care we put into it. The exceptions to this rule have been few and far between.
In fact, we don’t ask guests to do checkout chores or charge a cleaning fee, and most people clean up after themselves well anyway.
4. People really appreciate the little things
A lot of our success as hosts boils down to small details. We’ve been guests ourselves at dozens of short-term rentals, and we know what we appreciate. We offer guests local coffee, multiple ways to make it, and a full range of creamer and sweetener options. That alone makes a huge difference. We also make sure the kitchen is well-equipped with cooking spices, baking basics, and good filtered water. We try to think of everything anyone might need during a stay. People love it.
5. People’s basic cleanliness levels vary drastically
My husband and I always joke about how one-nighters are often messier than guests who stay for a full week. We’ve seen it time and again. One person or family can stay a week, and you’d almost never know they were there. Another can be there just one night and look like they’d lived there a month.
But there’s just a wide range, anyway, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to predict who’s going to be super clean and who’s not. Most people are pretty clean, to be fair. It’s just so funny to see how much it varies.
6. Halloween + young adults = oh no
Most of the problem guests we’ve had showed up around Halloween. Our rentals are in a college town, and we’ve had a few Halloweens where college-aged students rented the place. Despite our “No Parties” rule, those were the only experiences we’ve had that involved cleaning up puke.
If anyone had asked me 10 years ago when we thought we’d have the most problems with things like that, I would have guessed it would be college football game weekends. Nope. Halloween, every time.
7. The most baffling reviews people leave aren’t the ones you’d think
You might think the reviews that make us scratch our heads are the ones where people complain about something small, but they’re not. It’s the reviews where a guest gushes on and on about their experience being nothing but stellar, how they loved everything about their stay and will 100% come back again…and then give 4 out of 5 stars.
Like, what would we have to do to get 5 stars from you? It’s like this, but in a vacation rental context:
I really want to get inside the head of someone who has nothing to complain about but can’t bring themselves to give 5 stars.
8. Getting personal matters
People often complain about big, greedy developers buying up properties and turning them into short-term rentals managed by big, faceless management companies. It’s a legitimate complaint. We hate that, too.
Airbnb in particular was meant to be personal. We see hosting as a human-to-human transaction, not a business-to-customer one. We share some of our personal story in our guidebook—how my husband renovated the house, our experiences traveling, our desire to offer people a home-away-from-home, the names of the cats they might see in the windows next door—and people respond to that. I think part of why we’ve had so many positive experiences is because we prioritize being personal. Not in an intrusive way, but in a warm and welcoming kind of way.
As a result, we’ve had some great personal experiences. We once had a dad from China come to visit his son and cook us an incredible four-course meal. We know details about the families of our repeat guests. Even the folks we don’t have much interaction with indicate in their reviews and our guest book that they appreciate that personal touch.
9. The Golden Rule holds
The biggest takeaway is that seeing and treating people as people, with the respect, kindness, and care we would hope to receive, results in overwhelmingly positive experiences. Yes, there are occasional exceptions, but not nearly as many as I would have expected when we started. And they are just that: exceptions. It may be different for other hosts, but our 99-1 ratio has held for 10 years. No amount of online griping will change that reality.
