When you put your apartment or house up online every human in the world could potentially stay in your home for a few days. In a perfect world we would be able to trust everyone 100% of the time. Unfortunately that’s not the case.
With most booking sites you need to manually accept a reservation. Before you go accepting everyone, here are a few reasons you may need to decline a reservation.
An Empty Profile
Creating a site on a booking site can be done in less than a minute. This profile will be very vague however, offering no substance to help you learn about this stranger. At the bare minimum a profile should have their basic details, a clear photo and a little bit of information about what their life.
The Message You Receive Isn’t Personal
When people send you a message about your property, it doesn’t take long to know if they’ve taken any time at all to read your profile or if they simply copy and pasted a block of text from a template. If they haven’t taken time to read your profile, that’s an early warning sign.
Demanding From The Outset
If the potential guest is already asking questions you’ve answered in your listing, that’s a sign they could be a pain to deal with. If they have some genuine questions looking for a specific answer for their needs, that’s fine. But if they’re just listing a bunch of vague questions that take up your valuable time to reply too, stay clear.
Asking For A Discount
You may think asking for a discount is reasonable. You probably try and do this sometimes as there’s no harm in asking right?
On the other hand, there is a theme that those asking for a discount are not fun to deal with. They may try to do things on the cheap and become a hassle and create inconveniences for you.
They’ve Made Fussy Reviews Previously
When you’re looking through the clients previous stays, do they have lots of two, three and four star reviews? That’s not exactly a bad thing but once you get into reading about the stay at these places you might notice that the smallest of things are being pinned as the reason they’re not giving a five-star rating. They might not be totally unreasonable things but you’d rather not go through the pain of receiving a three star review when you’d normally get a five.
Your Gut Instincts Say No
Never underestimate your gut. If something just seems off about the person, don’t hesitate to decline the reservation. You don’t need to offer a reason. You wouldn’t want to accept them, then have a worrying feeling the entire time they’re in your space.
The sharing economy has come on leaps and bounds in the last five years. Sharing is awesome, but realistically, sharing with everyone is plain awkward. Thankfully, with practical thinking we can filter out those we cannot trust.