Hi Sallie, your post really made me cringe. You bring up some very tough 'issues' about owning a vacation rental and hosting guests, and demonstrate just how difficult it can be to meet high guest expectations.
My comments below are not an attack on you, or a counter to your comments. Rather they are meant to reflect how your comments demonstrate just how difficult it can be to meet guest expectations.
Yet I sort of cringe over things we've encountered that are simple and inexpensive (if not free) to address:
- The kitchen is stocked with a hodgepodge of mismatched flatware, dishes and glasses
My wife and I grapple with this, and disagree about it all the time. How is one NOT supposed to end up with a hodgepodge mismatch of kitchen dishes glasses and flatware? You have a nice brand new shiny vacation rental, and you outfit it with a set of nice flatware. And over the first six months, two or three of your cutlery pieces go missing, because guests... well... are guests. They lose things, destroy things, feed things to their dogs things... Who knows how they lose cutlery? We don't in our house, but the guests certainly manage to. So now what do you do? Buy an entirely new 48 piece set because your perfectly good existing set is missing two or three pieces? If you do, what do you do with the old set? Throw it out? Donate it to good will? Should that be practical or necessary? And what happens when a couple of other guests bring, and leave a few pieces of their own cutlery in your vacation rental (because they obviously are not as fussy as you or I about cutlery) so now I have a full set with a few pieces missing, plus a few pieces which don't match added in. What a mess. The fact is, there is no practical reasonable solution to this problem. And you as a vacation rental owner should understand that. Yet as a guest, you list it here as something that negatively impacted your stay. If this is not something that you as an experienced owner can grant a pass on, what hope is there for the rest of us in dealing with 'regular' guests?
(And don't suggest that buying and using the plain butt ugly replace-by-the-piece commercial hotel cutlery is a solution. It isn't. And even that stuff is often only sold in minimum quantities.)
So if you have solved this problem in a simple and inexpensive manner, I would love to hear all about it!
- The kitchen pantry is overflowing with takeout plastic containers, those disposable aluminum muffin pans, paper plates, a mix of small baking dishes—leaving little room for us to store our own pantry items for a 4-week stay
I was shocked once to show up at our vacation rental property to find the pantry shelves full of all kinds of things from the kitchen and elsewhere in the home. Why? Because every time that a cleaner came in and they encountered something they didn't know what to do with, they just stuck it in the pantry.
I was frustrated and upset. But that doesn't mean that I am unrealistic about the reasonableness of low-paid, non-english speaking cleaners taking the easy route out with cleaning and turning our home around in a minimal amount of time every week or two between guests.
And sometimes guests leave stuff behind. How are cleaners supposed to know what belongs and what doesn't? And what are they supposed to do about it? Who gives them permission to throw stuff out, and why should they if to do so would be wasteful and the item left could be of use to future guests? Again, there is no easy answer to this dilemma.
An owner's touch may head this problem off at the pass, but what if the owner can't be at the property for each clean, over a six month period? How do things build up? Over a year? Or when a pandemic hits and the owner won't see their own property for THREE years?
I can't imagine what I'm going to find when I finally do see mine!
- The bed pillows are stained and flat
Yes... of course they are.
Because the guests brought their own crappy pillows from home, and took off with the nice plump clean new ones that you just put out. We LOSE so many pillows it boggles my mind. But even more boggling is the crap that gets sometimes left behind in their place.
And you would hope that either the cleaner, the cleaner's manager, or the property manager would notice, and make sure that good pillows are once again put out. But mysteriously they don't. Even though they are competent, caring and just about the best kind of people you can find for the task, they don't see and find things like this. Only guests do when they open up a bed and get close to the pillows, or pull off the cases to launder them.
I had a guest encounter these types of SH*TTY pillows in our property, much to my utter horror! But she still left us a glowing review. I asked her why when I realized what had happened with the pillows and she told me "I used to work in housekeeping at a resort, and I know that guests take off with the great pillows all the time. You care too much about this place to have even known that the pillows I found were disgusting old crap. But I'm so used to guests doing this to vacation rental owners and resort managers that I brought my own pillows from home to use."
So aside from constantly buying and giving out essentially free pillows, which is not really cheap nor easy, what do you suggest?
- No mat for the slippery tub/shower in the ensuite bathroom (there's a mat in the other bathroom tub/shower)
I would be willing to be that the owner THINKS there is a mat there. There likely was when they last left the property.
But a guest threw it out, or took it home, or a cleaner did, and its gone, and no one is letting the owner know its missing. So how are they supposed to ensure that a bath matt is there for you? Owners can't fix problems they are unaware of, and the cleaners and their supervisors are just as blind to the missing item as guests are. Property managers do not, in my experience at least, pay any attention to this kind of detail. Only owners do. So what is the solution if you can't hire eyes and ears critical and caring enough to view things with an owners' (like yours) eyes?
- Not enough coat hangers, and they're mismatched
So a guests stole a bunch of coat hangers, or traded the nice matching ones out? I can't believe the number of hours my wife has WASTED sorting out and putting coat hangers back in their 'appropriate' closets so they match and the right number is there. But try to find a cleaner or manager or property manager that will even look at something like this? It's being anal, and too detail oriented, they'll say. And perhaps they're right.
But I know this is a problem (if they consider it to be, many don't) for every single one of our guests, except the ones who stay immediately after we leave. And I don't know of a solution for it. It's very hard to get others onboard in solving something that most others don't consider a problem.
Guests screw up coat hangers. It's a fact of life. Either you have no guests or no coat hangers. What's the solution?
- The fireplace is not to be used (no advance warning about this, even though it's in the photos and on the features list)
I bet the fireplace was a great feature, and the host originally wanted all of their guests to be cozying up to a nice fire, until some guest started a fire and had a few sparks fly out onto the new carpet, or a log spill out and start a small fire that threatened the entire property, or damaged enough of the carpet that the entire room had to be replaced.
I don't know... I'm just spit-balling here. But after seeing guests destroy utensils, knives, pots and pans, trivets, pot holders and the like because they don't understand the most basic things about using common kitchen tools... what is one to do?
Change the policy regarding fires in the fireplace, or risk having the entire place burn down?
Unfortunately there is no easy answer to the fact that a huge portion of the world are the lower common denominator, and they are just plain dumb! Just look at half (most?) of the people on what passes for TV these days? Do you really want them playing with fire in your vacation rental?
How would you address this?
- The house binder provides no information about urgent or emergency medical care (or veterinarian care)
Well... nice if it is there I suppose, and you or I may think to include it, but would an 'average' host? I don't know. And in an age of Mr. Google, is it really necessary? A guest can't look these things up on their own? Do we have to hold their hand that much?
Again, no easy answer. How much information is too much? I've been told I'm too helpful, provide too much info and am too thorough, making it tough to get the 'crucial' information that a particular guest needs. Except that their crucial information is different from the next guests, and so on and and so on.
You and I would include this information, in an easy to find and access place. I agree with you on this one.
And I bet it was great while it was there, until that one guest six months ago had a sick child, tore the emergency medical info page out of the house manual and took off with it, and nobody in the six months since has noticed it's missing because nobody needed it.
But the next guest who did was angry at the host because it wasn't there. So do we blame the host for that?
Sallie, everything you mentioned made me cringe because I KNOW my guests have experienced these things at my properties!
And NOT because I don't care, or I want them to. I specifically don't.
And I spend (waste?) hours of my life fixing, adjusting and tweaking my properties when I'm there so they DON'T experience these things. But that only lasts so long. I have vacation homes... meaning they are homes WHERE I VACATION. Not where I live. So I must rely on the best hired help I can get. And rocket scientists in my area are working at NASA, they're not working in the vacation rental industry.
I have to accept that at some point, I can only do what I can do, and I can't beat people to do everything to my intuitive standards. If I make a list, they ignore it, or can't understand it. There is no point in trying to get people to be what they simply are not capable of. They can't do it. And unfortunately, I have to work with the people available to me, just as we all must.
Sallie, I have a lot of empathy for you as a guest in your experience. But I must say, I have just as much, or perhaps more, empathy for an owner/manager trying to provide you with a great vacation rental experience using the best resources that they likely have available.
Personally, I have a lot of room and patience for anyone working in ANY service industry. It is exceedingly difficult to function profitably given the resources and economics available to make things happen. If anyone has answers to these challenges, that can and will be implemented by REAL people... I'm all ears!
