Should you accept a booking from an Airbnb guest with no reviews? We did, and here’s what happened.
When we first launched our listing, we knew we’d have to set the bar a little lower to get our first bookings. For example, we set our prices lower than other listings in the area and offered a super flexible cancellation policy.
After all, we were brand new and had zero reviews. We couldn’t expect guests to pay the same amount as they would for an established listing with hundreds of five-star reviews.
We also set the bar low for our guest requirements.
Airbnb allows you to set certain parameters for the guests you’ll host, like how many prior reviews they have and their star rating. If I remember correctly, we didn’t put any restrictions on these at all. We wanted to get our first few guests under our belt and start earning positive reviews! So, we had to be flexible.
Within a few days of publishing our listing, we got our first booking request for an upcoming weekend. The guest had a brand new Airbnb profile and no prior reviews. Should we go for it?
What if they were a scam artist? What if they had a party and trashed our place?
On the other hand, they were taking a chance on us by booking our listing when it had no reviews from other guests.
We decided to accept the booking.
Airbnb Guests With No Reviews – During The Stay
Since these were our first-ever guests, I was on high alert.
The day they were scheduled to check in I was glued to my phone, making sure to be available in case they had any issues.
By around 10 that night I hadn’t heard from them. No news is good news, right? I turned my phone’s volume up as loud as it would go just in case any alerts came in overnight and went to sleep feeling pretty good.
Around 12:30 AM, I woke up to the ding! of a text. It was a short message from our guests.
“The heat isn’t working upstairs.”
Fuck.
The heat has to be working, I thought. We just stayed there for a week!
My stomach turned. We lived an hour away and it was after midnight. If there actually was a problem with the heat, there was pretty much nothing I could do until the next day. I wanted our first guests to have a great experience, not run into issues on their very first night.
Sitting there in bed in the dark, I tapped out a response.
“Sorry about that! Have you tried turning up the thermostat on the living room wall?”
I had turned the heat down when we left earlier in the week. I was almost certain they just hadn’t turned it back up, but I couldn’t be sure.
I sat there waiting for a response, unable to go back to sleep.
After about an hour, I messaged again.
“Has it warmed up yet?”
No response.
At some point in the early morning hours, I finally drifted back off to sleep.
The next morning, still no word from the guests. I weighed our options. Should I call them? Drive up to the house? Let it go until I heard back?
I didn’t want to be annoying–after all, if the heat came on once they turned up the thermostat, they probably put their phones away and went on with their night. But I also didn’t want to leave them high and dry.
I ended up calling around and finding a hardware store in the area that would deliver space heaters to the house. I put them on standby and messaged the guests again in the early afternoon.
“Let me know if the heat kicked in! I can set you up with some space heaters if it’s still not warm enough.”
Finally, they messaged back.
“Sorry, just seeing this! Everything’s good, the heat is working!”
Phew. Crisis averted.
We didn’t hear from them the rest of their trip.
The Turnover
As far as I could tell, our first guests had a smooth stay and hadn’t done anything crazy like robbed us or burned the house down, but I’d have a better idea once I got to the house to clean it.
It was my first turnover and I was nervous about what I would find.
I walked in the front door to find… things looking totally normal.
I was worried about nothing, I thought, relieved.
I moved from the living room into the kitchen, where things looked a little messier. Clearly they’d been doing some cooking and hadn’t done a very good job of cleaning up. There was grease splattered on the stovetop and some unwashed pots and pans with caked-on food. Yucky, but nothing terrible.
Then I went into the downstairs bathroom.
I was washing my hands in the sink when it came spurting up from the drain.
Vomit.
I’ll spare you too many details, but someone had puked in the bathroom sink.
Grossgrossgrossgrossgross!
Why?! Why not the toilet, which was less than two feet away? Drunk people know no reason.
The sink was totally clogged, so in addition to turning over the entire house, I also had to make a trip to the hardware store for commercial strength drain opener and do three rounds of it before the sink was clear.
I shot a little video to document the fun.
What I Learned From Hosting Airbnb Guests With No Prior Reviews
1. Guests don’t read.
They don’t read the messages you send and they don’t read the guest binder (where we had instructions/an explainer about the thermostat). After this stay, I taped instructions on the wall near the thermostat and other areas, like by the side of the roller shades and various light fixtures.
2. Turnovers take longer than you think.
Right after this stay, I started purchasing doubles of all our bedding so I can come in with a clean set of linens instead of doing laundry on site.
3. Guests with no reviews are a wild card.
These guests weren’t necessarily bad. They didn’t damage anything (aside from temporarily stopping up the sink) or break any rules. They left the house a little messy and finding a barf surprise was gnarly, but I guess that’s the whole point of having a cleaning fee.
After this, we turned on stricter settings for which guests could book our place.
While I wouldn’t totally rule out Airbnb guests with no reviews in the future, I would definitely do a little bit more chatting back and forth to ask questions about what brings them to the area, who’s coming to the house, and set expectations for how Airbnb works.
Usually I prefer to be hands-off with guests, not bothering them with a bunch of messages while they’re on vacation, but being in closer contact with unreviewed guests might make them treat the property with a little more care.
So, tell me: do you or would you accept guests with no reviews at your property?
Read more about the process of getting our short-term rental off the ground here!
