STRA Episode 16: What to do When your Airbnb Guest is a Karen The Short Term Rental Authority Podcast

STRA Episode 16: What to do When your Guest is a Karen [00:00:00]
[00:00:05] Hey everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. We are John n Wendy Williams with the short term rental authority. Your authority on all things short term rental related to help make you the best operator ever. And today we are going to be talking about what to do when you have a Karen and we apologize to everyone.
[00:00:32] Named Karen. Yes, cuz I, I'm, it's, it's just a term, right? Yes. But I know some very nice Karens. Yes. In fact, your mother's named Karen. My mother's name is Karen. Yes. It's unfortunate, right? But it's basically what do you do with somebody who they, they tend to come in and they find every little thing that they could possibly find wrong.
[00:00:54] Right? And you're thinking, well, there shouldn't be anything wrong. . Nothing's perfect. No. Like if you, if you went through our house, the cleaners just came today at our house. Right. . And I guarantee you I could go around and find something. Yes. Right. For sure. If I wanted to say something. We have a visitor.
[00:01:12] Yes. Well, there's the culprit right there. Yes. Well, she's the one that makes things imperfect a lot times. With her shedding. With her shedding. But she's very sweet. She's very sweet. So what do you do? So let's, you wanna talk about like some of the. We're not recent. Well, we did have some recent Yeah, that's true.
[00:01:31] Goings on, right? We did have one lady. Well, which one you wanna talk about right? ? Because you, you, you will have a Karen, you, you will have someone who. Likes to complain about every little thing, every little leaf that they find on the back patio. Well, that's what this lady's thing was, right? Yes. Like a lot of times that starts with, I feel like it's something that [00:02:00] initially they didn't, they saw it could be anything really.
[00:02:07] There's always something that triggers it. Yes, I've noticed. And a lot of times it has something to do with the check in process or something like they couldn't get in the door. Like some, sometimes technology backfires or we forget to change it or, or something. Right. And they couldn't get in and it's, and it was that initial first experience.
[00:02:28] And then now they go through and take pictures of. Dust in the corner and hey, there's a mark on the wall over here. And how come there's leaves on the back patio? Well, cuz it's fall, right? and there are trees outside. Right? That's, that's lie . Right? And so it, and, and so it kind of becomes this thing like this, this, well this one particular lady, that's where it was, it was like there were leaves on the, this is a town home, has a patio.
[00:02:56] Yes, there are trees outside. It's November, October. In right, Charlotte, North Carolina leaves fall off trees no matter what you do, and she, and we have someone to come and do that. But we like to typically like to wait until all the leaves have fallen where the majority of the leaves have fallen off the trees.
[00:03:19] Like mid-November is usually when that happens, right? So we have someone, you know, at least twice a year come and get up all the leaves and put down new mulch and make it look nice. But she, well, that was her initial thing. She want, she wanted it done. Right. I get it. I get it. Okay. It's fine. It's fine. We, and we, we did it.
[00:03:44] We, we got it taken care of. We did. And that's usually our response to anything, you know, if there's a, a complaint or a concern or whatever. In fact, we even, that's part of our messaging the first morning is to say, Hey, , you know, let us know if anything's not up to your standards, we'll make it right. That type of thing.
[00:03:59] [00:04:00] And this particular lady did not contact us until something like five or six days into her reservation. And she was supposed to stay a long time. Yeah, I wanna say about two months. Well, she was staying through Jan the end of January. Oh wow. Was it? Or ma