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 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 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

crazi story 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 judicate this so we call the host and all the host has to do is deny it because there's no

photo evidence that goes one fortunately 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 guest 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 the stuff so you might be thinking yeah Brian chesky CEO of Airbnb Airbnb receives millions of calls that is 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 one 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 multifam 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 a reception team sent to me was very long and so I'm just giving you the brief summary she was sending messages like I'm 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 remember this isn't all the time but 1% of 100 reservations something is going to pop up and our teams manage tens of thousand 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 uh 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 ghost 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 um 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 it actually doesn't seem that crazy but that's not the end of the story she was actually with a lifesize unicorn I promise you you cannot make this stuff up uh 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 guess not being able to check into the property verified that it was in fact used air 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 code 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 uh 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 their 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 Chinese guests 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 uh 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 a suicide attempt where a knife was involved wrist was involved uh 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 happened so that 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 cancelled the calendar until we figured out what was wrong with this prop property our housekeeper 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 a scene from a crime movie it was really bad flies they sent a bunch of pictures um so we got

that one fixed but you just never know what's going to happen we really could go on and on with just crazy stories here but let me just finish up with one that I think uh 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 property and as you could imagine it caused quite a scene and so at first the guest thought it was our fault we had double book 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 the things we can verify and uh and so ultimately you know it was it was not our fault but you just never know right guest 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 uh 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 100 reservations well you're likely to en or something crazy there is some good news though most of the time we can weed out some of these sort of 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 4 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 in your property if you happen to be in some sort of shared apartment building or condominium they might go knocking on your neighbor doors you really just never know what might happen uh 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 strr riches.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