Use these 9 Red Flags to Avoid Problem Guests

After managing well over 50,000 guests in dozens of different cities, my team and I have learned that the guest screening piece is such a crucial, essential piece to short term rental business. In fact, it's one of those things that can really make or break your short term rental business or help you keep your sanity if you're getting it right and keep you from getting stressed out if you're running your Airbnb by yourself. So today we're going to talk about nine red flags that you can spot before a guest actually stays in your property. We're going to break down the minute details, the things that you need to look out for so that you can stop these bad reservations before they actually happen. Let's dive in all that on today's episode.

So here we go. There's some very common patterns that pop up time and time again that help us identify bad guests before they check into our property. The very first one is a simple one. It's to check your guests prior reviews. We do have the ability to do this not just on Airbnb, but also on vrbo, on booking.com as well. Make sure that you don't overlook that step. Sometimes times it's just written right there in plain sight. They're not a good guess since you want to make sure you cancel that reservation if it was instantly booked by calling Airbnb support saying you're not comfortable with a past review. The second red flag thing we want to look out for is an incomplete profile. So we know the different OTAs, they have different requirements, they all claim to have different background checks where they're doing a great job and they're going to weed out 100% of the difficult guests. But we all know the truth, they're not going to weed out a hundred percent. So we have to do our due diligence. And one of those really simple things is just making sure to get an id. So if you don't already have this checked on Airbnb, where you're also going to require an id, well, we'd recommend that. And actually none of the major platforms require an id, so you can ask for it after the reservation, which of course we always do. And if a guest has any sort of pushback, like I don't want to send you my id, remember, anytime someone travels and stays in a hotel, that's always a requirement. So it should be the same for your short term rental as well. If someone gives you pushback and they don't want to send their ID over to you, that's a Red flag. Just a quick side note here, you want to make sure that your rental agreement, or what Airbnb would call their house rules, has all of these rules in place, too. So take the ID example. If you have a house rule that says we need a copy of your ID before you can check in and a guest doesn't send it, well, you can cancel their reservation penalty free. But you got to make sure that your house rules are set up properly. You can grab ours for free in the link down below in the show notes. The third red flag is inconsistent or no communication at all. So if you have a guest book your property, most of the time, they're going to be most active. They're going to communicate the most the moment they make that reservation, and then sometimes just a couple hours before they actually check in. But if you had some sort of policies in there, some sort of verification, some sort of questions that you asked the guests and they didn't respond to you at all, well, that is a reason for you to be able to cancel that reservation. All of these nine red flags we're going to go over. Of course, the more things that are standing out, the more likely the guest is going to be difficult. Three out of the nine red flags are showing up. You're going to want to be a little more concerned than maybe just just one. 4. Sign of a difficult guest. The fourth red flag is if they're just sharing, like, way too much information up front. We know that we're accepting guests from all over the place, and the guests that we do accept are just going through different situations, right? Sometimes maybe they lost a family member or maybe they're going through a divorce. But if they're exposing all of that up front and they're just lots and lots of communication that doesn't have to do with the rental, well, that's sign of a potentially difficult guest. The fifth red flag for a difficult guess. And this is kind of associated with number four. But if they're asking just a ton of questions, so we know that your listing should be set up perfectly. So all of the questions someone would ask they could answer just by looking at your listing. But we know most guests are not reading that much anymore, right? So you should have some sort of idea, based off all your past reservations, how many sort of questions come up? You know, maybe it's one or two or three. Again, if the same question's coming up over and over, it means you're not doing a great job on your listing and you need to add that in there so it's much more clear. So aside from the general questions for a property, so what I'm talking about here are questions really outside of property details, right? Just really verifying the minute details with everything. What sort of cleaning chemicals do you use? What color light bulbs do you have in the bedside lamps? I mean, you can get a sense for how difficult someone's going to be based on their communication, right? The sixth red flag for a difficult guess is when they're trying to push the boundaries on your rules. Maybe your property sleeps four people and they want to bring six, or maybe they want to bring eight. The more they're trying to push that boundary, the more potentially difficult they could be. And now, of course, if you have a Property that sleeps 12 people and someone says, hey, my niece wants to come as well, can we bring 13? That's much different than a studio that sleeps two people and someone wanting to bring two more people, right? Same goes with dogs and animals. You know, maybe someone's coming with two dogs. You have a weight limit for 10 pounds and they say, Can I bring my 50 pound dogs? And if you say no and they still book, then yeah, you might want to double check your cameras when they first arrive. Maybe they want a lot more flexibility with check in and checkout times. This is a very common one, right? And of course this depends on your housekeeping schedule if you're going to be able to accommodate it in most cases. But there are certain properties where this is much more difficult. I have a property down in Brazil, for example, that has a biometric entry. You scan your fingers and you get in. In order for someone to rent that property, we have to have an actual key exchange. This is really the only property I have that doesn't have like a digital lock or WA to enter because we have to have that exchange. We accept check ins up till 8pm, but we have people ask us all the time, my flight gets in later or I'm going to be there at 10pm and what we found is that when people say I'm going to be there at 9, knowing that your rules 8, a lot of times they show up at 10 or 11 or 12 or 1. So if you're a little flexible on your rules up front, then a lot of times guests will unfortunately take advantage of that and push the boundaries. So just keep an eye out for that. If someone's trying to do that before checking in, your property might be a sign of a difficult guest. Number seven is sort of vague travel plans. So we always like to ask our guests, why they're coming to town, what time they expect to arrive. And sometimes we get some really vague answers where it's just like, I'm not quite sure. And if they're flying in from a different place, usually they should have some sort of flight or something like that. It's often the case that they want to change that reservation as well. So if they're sort of unsure up front, then it creates more changes going forward. And of course you have a cancellation policy, but these will likely be some of those scenarios where someone does cancel, but then they complain or they try to get a refund based off some sort of prior communication. So just keep an eye out for sort of vague travel plans. Number eight, this is a super important one. This is last minute bookings. We've talked about this one a lot on the channel. If you're new to the channel, you can go to strict. Com. We have literally hundreds of episodes there. We have interviews with some of the leading CEOs and founders of the software and industry. So check it out. We also have a lot of free ebooks, things that we've learned. Last minute bookings. We know that this is a red flag because we just have less time to verify information. And depending on where this reservation came from, it could be a little more risky. We would say that a last minute booking with booking.com is going to be a lot more risky than a last minute booking with Airbnb, for example, but either way, you have less time to verify the guest. We found last minute bookings have a much higher correlation with parties or just issues going on with your properties. Make sure that if you are accepting last minute bookings, you have enough time to verify the guests. Consider putting a buffer in there so someone can't book like a couple hours before. Maybe you set it to 24 hours. The last red flag, and perhaps the most important one, is that local guests will try to book your property. And that is a red flag. Most of the time, people wanting to book your property to live in the same area are wanting to do something at your property that they didn't want to do at their own. And so you got to keep an eye out for this. Unfortunately, you can't discriminate is what Airbnb would say against the locals. You can put it in your house rules and say, if you're a local, please contact us first so we can get some more information. Again, you can't actually enforce that, but a lot of times you get locals reaching out and there's lots of good reasons why they might be needing to stay, right? Maybe they had an issue with their property or it's going through renovation or whatever it happens to be we don't want to weed out everyone. There's nine red flags. And again, the more of these things that are happening, the more likely it is that you're going to be having a difficult guest. Most of these things we can weed out from the very beginning based off their communication, based off their behavior, and based off their booking patterns. So there you go. There are nine red flags, nine reasons why you might have a difficult guest checking into your property. Remember, the chances of having a difficult guest is very, very rare. And of course, if you're aware of these things ahead of time, then that chance is even smaller. I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did, I'd really appreciate if you wouldn't mind giving a thumbs up. Consider subscribing to the channel or sharing it with someone that you think might find value in it. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous.

Sam.