When you're an Airbnb host, you're all in. Along with the worries that your place will get trashed or house repairs will eat up all your profits, you live and die by the public review of your place.
Airbnb guests don't share these stresses, but guests receive reviews too, and the hosts who can see them use them to find out everything from whether they leave reviews to how difficult they were to deal with. This can affect practical issues, like whether you'll get the booking you want or extras when you stay at an Airbnb.
And whether that's your motivation, or, like friends of longtime Airbnb host Seth Porges, you just want to be the best Airbnb guest you can be, there are steps you can take.
Here are seven ways to be a five-star Airbnb guest, including advice from the handful of top hosts Porges reached out to in Forbes and other experts:
Keep your discount requests until after booking. According to "Alice," a Washington, D.C. host quoted in Porges' article, asking for discounts prior to booking "consistently comes up as a top pet peeve in numerous host groups online. It is off-putting to be asked for a discount when our homes are very often already significantly discounted compared to hotels and other available housing options."
She added that she is "far more likely to decline reservation requests from those who ask for discounts."
Share yourself and your culture. Whether you're staying the weekend a state away or 10 days in another country, consider offering your host a small gift that represents your unique travel background. One experienced Airbnb host with an upscale Brooklyn apartment described the baseline of acceptable behavior for guests as not coming home drunk at 4 a.m. and throwing up on the couch and not expecting her to do their dishes. One way her guests moved from this passable status to becoming great guests was with small kind gestures, according to a blog post she wrote that was picked up by The Points Guy. "Many even brought gifts like chocolate or wine from their home countries, which added a fun, cultural component to the experience."
Create a detailed profile. Paperwork can be a pain, but sharing details in the bio section of your Airbnb profile is part of being a considerate guest. And if that's not enough motivation, it can also encourage a potential host to accept more of your requests before booking and during your stay, according to Airbnb's online guide to being a great guest. "Hosts prefer to know who's asking to stay with them," it said.
Share a profile pic. Airbnb requires guests to share details like their full name and a confirmed phone number before requesting a reservation. It also suggests an updated profile photo, but that's optional. If you're looking to be a 5-star quality guest, you'll not only provide this photo but will make sure it looks like you will upon arrival. Even if your host asks guests for an official ID as part of Airbnb's Verified ID process, it's considerate to add a photo to your profile, which keeps any potential concern at bay. And rest assured, you won't lose any privacy with the photo: Airbnb policy dictates that hosts never get even a glimpse of a guest's real email address, even after you book.
Credit: Contributed by Trip101.com
Credit: Contributed by Trip101.com
Keep the lines of communication open (and cell phones charged) once you're in town. However much you'd like your stay to be stress-free, don't make it tough for your host to reach you once you've arrived. As power Airbnb host Tanya Mitchell of San Sebastián de La Gomera, Canary Islands, told Forbes, falling into a communication black hole makes it impossible for your host to share valuable information (like, say, the road will be blocked after 10 a.m. Sunday).
Give your hosts a chance to fix problems instead of just saving issues to share on the public review. "We can't fix what we don't know about," Mitchell noted. "Most hosts are pretty anxious to please and would much rather resolve an issue quickly than hear about it after the fact."
Use the Airbnb rating system for reviews, not the typical hotel star system. In a piece for Forbes on critical Airbnb guest errors, Porges pointed out one way even the most well-meaning guests might kill their chances of being viewed as great guests: mistakenly using the common "hotel" star rating instead of Airbnb's standards. "This is every Airbnb host's nightmare review: 'Great stay! Everything was perfect! Four stars.'" Porges noted. "Many guests view the Airbnb star-rating system as analogous to hotel stars, which have nothing to do with how well a stay met expectations, and everything to do with indoor swimming pools and on-call concierges."
If a host met or exceeded all you required, the services and amenities matched what you required and what was posted, go for the "five." Airbnb ratings are considered in the context of what you contracted for and how those expectations were met, not if your stay was comparable to that at a 5-star spot like The Four Seasons.
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