airbnb n me

Our airbnb room as it was

A few weeks ago I ‘unlisted’ our airbnb page.  

I first heard about airbnb in Spring 2012. We had just bought our flat and my uncle and aunt were planning on coming to Edinburgh. They asked if they could stay with us and we told them they could, but that we had no furniture. They were welcome to sleep on air beds, but they wisely passed. Instead they decided to stay at an airbnb. I had no idea what this airbnb thing was, but I soon fell in love with it.

If you don’t know what airbnb is, go here; this is not a blog describing it but my experience as an airbnb host.

After doing a bit of research, which mainly involved looking at my uncle and aunt’s two airbnbs in Edinburgh and talking Kristina Wong during the 2012 Fringe Festival, who runs/ran one in LA, we got to planning. We had a room we weren't using and a futon that was missing parts. After being able to fix the futon in early 2013, we created our airbnb host page - I would post the link to our page, but it’s now unlisted.

We offered a room, for up to two people, use of our living room, kitchen, and cold breakfast items. I also baked something for each guest.

Last March, our first guests arrived. In November our last guest left. In the months in between we learned what it was like to run a kind-of hotel, how to deal with living with people we had just met, and that you simply can’t satisfy every guest.

The good guests were great. They would tell us when they were expecting to arrive, would arrive in that time window; they would eat the food we had gone to the trouble to buy/make, and would leave the place relatively clean. Sadly, there’s no fun in writing about a good guest because what more can I say; they were good guests.

I wouldn’t describe any of our guests as being bad guests - that would be way too harsh so instead, I’ll say we had some odd guests. We actually had a couple of guests that were good guests and odd guests, so odd is not code for not good.

We had guests that bought practically the exact same fruit we had bought for them to eat (after we had told them that the fruit we bought was for their consumption). They ended up eating very little fruit at all and we ended up having twice as much fruit as we had before they got here. I don’t mind fruit, but there’s only so much one can do with 15 apples.

We had guests who wanted to go to the grocery store with me. I offered to pay for the coffee they they wanted but they refused. They did however want me to get the 'points' on my grocery store membership that they got from buying said coffee. This involved us going to the customer service desk and taking several minutes to 2 points on my membership card that has no real value until it reaches something like 1000 points. I was at the grocery store at least 3 times longer as I would have been if I had gone by myself - I don't think the 2 Sainsbury's points were worth it.

There, of course, were the late/non-communicative guests; guests that would give us an arrival time then show up 4 hours later; guests that didn’t respond to any of our messages asking them when they would arrive then were surprised when we were not home when they showed up before we were home from work.

We also discovered there are three types of social guests - the anti-social (lock themselves in the room whenever we were home and would wait until we were not home before they would do anything in the flat); the semi-social (would ask questions about where to go, what to do, didn’t hide, but didn’t want to be our best friends either), and the too-social (see the grocery store paragraph above - the type of guest who is nice, but you also kind of would like them to give you a little space). I should note that I would be an anti-social guest category, though I wouldn’t book a room with our kind of set-up.

I actually liked the semi-social and too-social guests. I felt like I always learned something in talking to them.

I liked it when we would come home and a guest was watching ‘Good Will Hunting’ on our TV. Not only did they feel comfortable enough to watch our TV, they also had good taste. 

I liked it when a guest would feel comfortable enough to sit in our rocking chair while watching TV, with us at our computers in another room.

I liked it when the baked goods I made were gone a day and half into guests’ stay. 

I liked when people would eat our yogurt or our eggs (almost no guests ate our yogurt or eggs), or use our stove top to cook anything (two guests did this).

There was very little I didn't like about our airbnb experience. I guess I didn’t like it so much when guests would want to use our washing machine the day before they were leaving (mainly because we don’t have a dryer so their clothes would be wet, so I guess that’s their problem).

I enjoyed the experience. We met people from all over the world (mostly from Germany, really) and there is a part of me that would have liked to keep it going. But alas, the guest room has been turned into an office and I wouldn’t want to charge people to sleep in a room that I would like to use whenever I want.

Maybe one day we’ll live in a bigger place, but for now, our airbnb hosting experience has ended.

Our former airbnb room as it is now