STR Nightmares: Craziest Airbnb Guest Stories

When you talk to most hosts, they usually tell you that the reality of having a bad guest is very small. You know, maybe it's 1%, maybe it's 2%, but the reality is we're hosting a lot of reservations. And so if 1 or 2% of those are bad or crazy or extreme, like the examples that we're going to talk about today, well, that still adds up to be a fair amount of crazy guest experiences. And so recently, the CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, shared his craziest story.

And.

And instead of just repeat what he said, I thought I'd just share the clip with you. So stay tuned. Let's take a look.

One day, a customer calls us and says they want a full refund. We say, why do you want a full refund? They said, because the house is haunted and there's a ghost in the house. And we're like, okay, well, we have to adjudicate this. So we call the host, and all the host has to do is deny it because there's no photo evidence. That goes. Well, unfortunately, the host confirms the ghost, says that it's a friendly ghost named Stanley, and that the ghost, Stanley, is in the listing description. We read the listing description. Stanley is mentioned. So we go back to the guests, and the guest says, yes, we knew about Stanley. That's why we booked it, but Stanley has been harassing us all night. How do you adjudicate that? So I guess the point is, in this new economy built on trust, you can only imagine the kind of issues you deal with. There is no playbook for this stuff.

So you might be thinking, yeah, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. Airbnb receives millions of calls. That is crazy. I could never expect that to happen in my property. But you know what? It happened at one of ours. And so I want to share exactly what went down and give you a couple details and just let you know that anything can happen. And, folks, we can't make this up. So I'm going to go ahead and just read some of the comments that our reception team shared with me after reaching out to them to ask if they had any crazy stories of their own. I knew they had crazy stories, but really wanted to find out what the craziest ones were. And I was shocked that they came back with another ghost story after Brian Chesky's ghost story. And so this is what they said. They said during the first three nights of this guest day, she kept messaging us and insisting that there was someone who keeps walking by and opening the door. So at this particular property, we do have cameras in the common areas. This is actually a small multi family building. It used to be a traditional hotel. It's been converted. And so our reception team was able to easily monitor and see that there were in fact no guests walking by. But even after confirming that there were no guests there, that the guest was paranoid and said that they wanted to cancel, which we agreed to. So just to fill you in a little bit more, during her stay, she was sending a lot of messages. I mean, the response that our reception team sent to me was very long. And so I'm just giving you the brief summary. She was sending messages like, I am not sleeping. Gigantic smiles. Not with any sort of emoji, but just actually putting that right in the text. And also messages like, now I have to worry about him. Little ghost emoji following me to my next hotel. Holy moly. So a bit of a crazy scenario, right? We did in fact let her cancel. You know, sometimes it's better just to let some really difficult guests go, especially if they have a longer stay, so you don't have to kind of sit through the torture. You know, sometimes it can be really, really difficult. And remember, this isn't all the time, but 1% of a hundred reservations, something is going to pop up. And our teams manage tens of thousands of reservations. And so some of these real world stories that I'm going to share with you here in a second, they will blow your mind. And yes, none of them are made up. These are real world stories and they're going to be a little bit more intense than these ghost stories. So just stay tuned for that. But before we wrap up with our ghost story, this guest unfortunately just left us a three star review over a year later. And so this was a booking.com reservation and she left her review on Google. Yes, you can leave reviews on Google. If your business is set up under a Google business account and someone stays there at the property, even if they don't book through Google, they can still leave a review there. So it was a three star review and it was long, a really, really long one. But in that I just wanted to pull out a couple quick things she mentions in there about the ghosts. I just, and this is in capital letters. I just want you to know if anyone else knows that the property is haunted. What happened to them? What happened to the ghost? She's still talking about the ghost. So yes, crazy things happen just before we jump into the next one. The craziest thing about this is that she requested to Book again, in which we kindly denied her reservation. Let's go ahead and jump into some of the wildest guests that we've had at our properties. And we manage properties all across the board in lots of different states and different countries. So this first one isn't really much of a story. It's just we had someone standing at the top of a common area staircase. A woman was there naked, which after doing this for a long time, that actually doesn't seem that crazy. But that's not the end of the story. She was actually with a life size unicorn. I promise you, you cannot make this stuff up. This is what my reception told me. We have cameras in our common areas and on the exterior of most of our properties and this is what they saw. We've certainly had our fair share of guests not being able to check into the property, verified that it was in fact user error. They weren't entering the right code, they were entering it too fast. Some of these locks can be a little tricky, but we monitor them all online so we can see if they're actively working. We can open doors for guests, so on and so on. But we had one guest one time that booked a property at this nice little gated community of cottages. There were 12 of them and they were not able to get into their cottage using their co and instead of calling us, unfortunately, they proceeded to go to every single other cottage in the community and asked the neighbors if they could stay at their properties. Just really weird stuff. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up. And sometimes, unfortunately, if you have multiple properties next to each other, it can create a bit of a bad experience for the neighbors. I remember in my very early days, I've been managing properties with my own portfolio and with our team for over a decade now. And one of the very first ones where I was still much more involved with reception, I remember we had some ch. Chinese guest check in. They entered the wrong apartment, the door was unlocked, they did not speak English, there were already guests in there. And basically, long story short, they were, they were arguing, they were yelling in Chinese and you know, our team had to work all this out on the back end. But these things happen for sure. I've got one other story you're, you're not going to believe. It's like three levels deeper than what we're doing right now. But before we do, just a couple other quick ones. We have had some, some crazy and unfortunate situations too. We have had suicide attempt where a knife was involved, a wrist was involved, and a neighbor found A guest. So, yes, there are some just really crazy and sad things that are going to happen at some point with your property. If you're managing a portfolio, then your odds are greater. Right. We got to think that, you know, we're hosting people from all over the world in all different points of their life. You know, sometimes there's people going through divorces, sometimes there's people separating or they're sick or whatever it happens to be, and some crazy stuff happens. So that definitely, definitely was more of a sad one. Luckily, that guest was confirmed. They were all right after being brought to the hospital. Another interesting one that happened. And this is actually from our end, I wouldn't say we. We really dropped the ball, but we didn't know what was wrong with this property. And so we had guests telling us, hey, there's just this weird sort of dead smell in this property and it's not going away. And our housekeepers would go in there after these turns. You know, it didn't take too long before we ultimately just canceled the calendar until we figured out what was wrong with this property. Our housekeep could not find anything. And ultimately our maintenance people, after really inspecting the property, I mean, and they had to go digging to find out this surprise, and they found it. And it was a dead raccoon that had fallen in between the sheetrock of the wall. And so the smell was coming through the property, but we couldn't find anything. And they ultimately opened up the wall and it looked like a scene from a crime movie. It was really bad flies. They sent a bunch of pictures. So we got that one fixed. But you just never know what's going. And we really could go on and on with just crazy stories here. But let me just finish up with one that I think kind of, kind of tops most of them. And that is we had a guest check into their property. This is also in a property that had some shared common areas. Shared terrace, for example. And they checked into the property, they made a cocktail, and they headed out to enjoy the space on the shared terrace. And when they returned to their room, they found someone else. A couple, I should say, on the bed. Yes. Having sex, making love, whatever way you want to describe it, that couple was in that guest's property. And as you could imagine, it caused quite a scene. And so at first the guests thought it was our fault we had double booked the property. But no, in fact, it was the couple that just went into the wrong property. They were also staying there at the same building. I guess they didn't bother to look at the door numbers or the address numbers. And the door was also unlocked. All these things we can verify. And, and so ultimately, you know, it, it was not our fault. But you just never know, right? Guests can do so many unexpected things. This is just a small glimpse of what our team goes through on a regular basis. Of course, we have lots of properties that we own and manage. And so if you're just operating one property out there, the chances of these really crazy things happening are going to be much, much less, right? They are that 1%. But remember, if you have a hundred reservations, well, you're likely to encounter something crazy. There is some good news, though. Most of the time, we can weed out some of these sort crazy guests before they even stay with us. We can definitely help weed out guests that could potentially be bad or that we don't want in our property. I've done a video on that already. Make sure to check that out. It's five warning signs that you will have a bad guest. And I actually recorded this like four years ago, but I went back and reviewed it before creating this video and it's still 100% relevant. Our team goes through all of these five checks every time we have a guest reservation to make sure that we don't have some kind of craziness going on. So, yes, you may one day have a guest claim that there are ghosts at your property, just like we have. And just like Brian Chesky from Airbnb talked about, you will undoubtedly have lots of guests that are going to have trouble checking into your property. If you happen to be in some sort of shared apartment building or condominium, they might go knocking on your neighbor's doors. You really just never know what might happen. And of course, if you don't want to handle these frustrations or these crazy guest situations yourself, well, you know that we are managing properties around the world. You can head to str. Com. There's a little property management button there. We'd love to chat with you to see how we can help, to see how we can make your hosting journey smoother. Until next time, I hope you have a wonderful week.