I’ve always had a perfectly pleasant Airbnb experience (except for the time some d-bag canceled our reservation in Toronto just days before we arrived). Granted, the handful of times I’ve used Airbnb over hotels we’ve rented out the entire apartment and not just a room, so it has always been me and the friends I was traveling with and there wasn’t an x-factor introduced to make things weird. After reading through all of these Airbnb hosts share their stories of the most memorable guests I think it’s become pretty obvious that things are most likely to get weird when complete strangers cross paths. There aren’t really any horrific or awesome stories of guests who rented out the entire house or apartment, shit definitely gets the weirdest when strangers who have nothing in common try to inhabit tiny spaces together. For the most part though all of the most memorable guests actually ended up doing really nice things for their hosts, save for a few very bad seeds. I don’t want to give away too much here so let’s just get to the most memorable Airbnb stories, shall we? (via AskReddit)
Martha_is_a_slut:
Guest kept poking my rescue dog saying “he won’t bite me”. Dog bit him.
patternedjeggings:
I’ve never done AirBnb, but I host people from Couchsurfing quite regularly.
When I was living in China, my boyfriend and I hosted these two guys from Barcelona. Adri and Carlos, they were fun.
By which I mean they pissed in alleys, poured beer on a Japanese tourist who told me I was ugly and hit on everything that moved. They were supposed to travel to other parts of China (was living in Beijing at the time), but ended up coming back three times because they “missed us”.
I’ve also come home from work to find people having sex on my couch three times. Twice it was the same lesbian couple from Nanjing.
I love hosting people. Honestly, the craziest encounters are often the best. You make great friends, it allows you to see your city through new eyes and they often give you presents. Or just leave random shit at your house.
remendousHeh:
Had two rather interesting stories when I rented out my place for SXSW. First weekend, a lady from NY rented my place and posted on Twitter a reference that the downside of renting an AirBNB from a man was there was no hair dryer. AirBNB saw the tweet, and had a hair dryer delivered within thirty minutes. Good marketing, I thought.
The next weekend, two people rented my place, and one of them happened to be a fairly attractive social media marketing woman. She decided to stay an extra night, and offered to take me out for drinks that night. Met up, one thing leads to another and end up hooking up with her – in my own bed, that she had paid $800 to stay in that night. Which I guess kind of makes me a hooker, and I’m totally ok with that.
IAmBabs:
Another tale of me living in Brooklyn:
My old roommate (Male) was leaving on a business trip for a month, and said two of his friends from France were taking his room, and would be taking up his part of the rent and electric bills. Female Roommate and I were fine, because our part of the bills weren’t changing.
Cue a month of:
Random food belonging to me and Female Roommate being eaten
Fridge being left open for hours
Windows being left open with AC cranked
Jizz everywhere in the bathroom
Waking up to be hit on by people I couldn’t understand
Sand everywhere.
The electric bill almost tripled. I had a full time job at this point, and was gone for 12 hrs a day, so I couldn’t police the apartment. Female Roommate fucked off somewhere to avoid them. Male Roommate later admitted it was an AIRBNB thing, and we forbade him from letting strangers randomly live with us for any amount of time.
LittlelLo:
Rented out my flat in south bank London to two American teenagers whose parents did it for them. I had to be there to show them how the alarm worked as parents didn’t trust someone not to break in when they were sleeping “And do god knows what to our girls!”
Skip to two days later and I’m woken up at 2am by a call from one of the girls frantic, they were being arrested and didn’t know who else to call but couldn’t tell me why. Now at this point I was worried because they seemed a little air-headed but nice enough girls. So I called their parents to let them know what was happening and I was going to the station for them and I’ll call them as soon as I know more. When I got there I’m told that these two bitches BROKE INTO THE FLAT ONE FLOOR DOWN and were trashing it. They thought they whole fucking thing was more of a hotel but people lived in the trashed flat full time and were out that evening and had to come home to find two 19 year old fucking up all their shit.
I was so pissed. I called the parents and let them know and they were just weird about it. I don’t know if they didn’t beleave me or what but they soon must of found it real when they got the knowledge that my neighbors were going to press charges.
I noped the fuck out of ever doing airbnb again and offered to pay for damages to the other flat but thankfully my neighbors were nice people and said that they wanted the girls who actually did it do pay for it. Kinda still feel bad for that but can’t force it on them.
billythefly90:
Well not a host, but rented a room for over a month and there was an air mattress that was for rent in the living room. This is in Beijing, China by the way. Middle of the night, the man renting the air mattress, knocks on my door with a thing of beer. I’m hurting from eating way too much and open the door to my bedroom. There is a complete language barrier and he motions me to follow him. He just points to the TV and says the word “Funny.” He motions me to sit on the couch and we end up watching Top Gear with subtitles. We’re both laughing at the same show and can only communicate with thumbs up. It was a good night.
seldomseen_kid:
I host in Manchester, UK, usually just get people visiting for one night to go and watch the football but recently I’ve had people staying for a week or so for contract work. I don’t mind either and as I share my house I make an effort to actually chat to them. Makes for a less awkward morning encounter!
So this guy comes to stay, in his late 50s, I’m 30F but its no big deal, I talk/listen to people for a living and can usually find some common ground and generic conversation topic. On this occasion we were experiencing a heatwave so being British we started talking about the weather. He’d driven a couple hundred miles and I sympathised as I’d just met up with some family who’d done a similar trip. Turns out they’d travelled from the same place. Turns out he’s from the same place as my dad. Turns out he played rugby with my dad when they were 16. I’ve literally never met another person unrelated to me from that part of the country and here was this guy paying to stay in my spare room.
He was a bloody lovely bloke and gave me a bottle of cava when he left.
Alahr:
Had a vegan couple stay over for a night so the wife could attend a yoga / spirit-healing / shamanism seminar in town.
All that’s fine and they were great guests, but the kicker was when the husband asked if I’d seen the show Portlandia and then described himself and his wife “like Portlandia, except in real life.” When he came back from town he offered me a piece of the special organic home-made chocolate they bought from a local shop.
Must be two of the most self-aware people I’ve ever met!
sol_on_fire:
We had a guest book our guest home for her birthday weekend. It was just going to be her and her ‘brother’. She texted the day before saying it was just going to be her. I thought that no one should have to be alone for their birthday, so we put up a happy birthday banner and bought her some Cupcake wine with a decorative birthday wine glass and a big cupcake. She cried. Turns out the brother was actually a married guy she’d moved across the country for, but big surprise, hadn’t/wouldn’t leave the wife. They broke up the day before her romantic beach birthday trip.
I hope she’s found better people to hang out with.
Edit to add: typically the messy, spill coffee on the white carpet, complain about needing to remodel the jacuzzi tub into a shower people were 60+. People with kids almost always leave the place perfectly clean and apologize for the mess. And if you make a one time special allowance for a dog they will lock the dog in the bathroom and then complain about the dog hair in the tub.
At least that’s my experience.
WeDaNorth:
Not hosts, but this experience as tenants was quite memorable.
Some backstory: Four of my friends and I decided to go to California. For accommodations, we chose to rent out a BnB online. Upon landing, things got sketchy. We contacted the host (let’s call her Veronica) to notify her of our arrival. She told us the address of the apartment, which was different than the one initially listed. We were also told not to contact the front desk for anything, but instead to her directly. This raised some red flags, but we were only staying for three nights so we weren’t too concerned.Now to the eventful night: After having a great time around town, we headed on back to our room to chill for a bit before going to a club. When we got ready to leave, we went over to the door, but realized the lock is broken. We struggle for 20 minutes trying to get the door open, but to no avail. There also were no screwdrivers around that would allow us to remove the lock. We were essentially stuck inside our room on the 49th floor of this apartment complex so we decided to contact Veronica. After another 30 minutes of trying to explain things through texts, she says she will call the front desk to help us out. This is when things get fucked up. 40 minutes later, the maintenance man comes to our room (let’s call him Hector). Problem is that Hector is drunk and banging on our door. Oh yeah, did I mention Veronica was about to get evicted in a couple of days due to overdue rent? We had no idea either. Anyways, Hector tells us he will let us out when we pay our overdue rent whether it takes 4 hours or 4 days. We try to explain what’s happened but he doesn’t seem to understand us. He’s angrily trying to break down the door to come in. Now, here we are, five guys who aren’t from the area and the only exit from the room we are currently stuck in is the door that is being broken down by Hector. We decided to call 911 since we didn’t know whether this guy had a gun on him. While on the line with the operator, he somehow manages to come inside and I shit you not the door locks behind him and is stuck once again. Now the five of us are stuck with pissed off Hector looking around and asking about rent not knowing whether he is armed while we are quietly on the line with the cops. Hector calms down once he realizes we know nothing about the rent situation. At around the same time, cops rush to the building and are demanding Hector open the door with his hands up. But the door is stuck, and Hector is trying to open it up with a large kitchen knife, because why not? After some shouting back and forth, we finally get Hector to drop the knife. Some police officers manage to get out to a neighbour’s balcony and ask two of us already standing out there what went down. We describe the situation and they head back to try to get the door open. Eventually, the cops got it open and after further explanation of the situation, everything turned out well for those involves. Except for Veronica. She was found to be subletting apartment rooms and condos online. She got completely fucked by her landlord after she was fucking them over for the last few years.
tl;dr: Accidentally booked an illegal room online. Somehow got locked in with a dude named Hector. Shit went down with Hector and the cops.
mrmdc:
I rented out my apartment and the heater broke down in the middle of winter.
My guest calls me to tell me and I immediately call someone to go fix it.
When the guests leave (I didn’t meet them since I was out of town) and I come back home, I see that all the windows and doors now have sealant around them and the frames have been caulked so there are fewer drafts. There were also a few other fixes done to the place.
Apparently, my guest spoke the local language better than I do and told the repairman to fix a bunch of other shit in my apartment while he was there. It didn’t cost me anything extra and she still left me a 5 star review.
Not a very exciting story. But it was neat.
nutellatime:
Well, since this has no actual stories, I suppose I’ll tell my peripherally-related story where I was not the host and it wasn’t an AirBnb.
I (female) and a friend of mine (also female) decided to take a trip abroad during one of our summer breaks from college. We mostly stayed in hostels and with friends in a few places, but in London, most of the good hostels were either fully booked or out of our price range so we decided to try Couchsurfing. We got in touch with host who lived in a houseboat on the Thames (should have been red flag #1) and he said we were welcome to stay as long as we needed.
After our first day in London, we started to follow the directions to his place. They were pretty good directions, but left out the fact that he wasn’t really in London, but 45 minutes outside of it on the train that required a ticket not covered by our tube passes. But whatever, we shelled out the extra money and got on the train with our giant backpacks. After the train ride, we got off and followed the directions that were basically “cross the street and walk through an unmarked trail until you find the river and walk upstream until I wave you down,” which probably should have been red flag #2.
We trek through absurd amounts of mud and find this guy, who is sitting on the deck of this tiny, shabby houseboat shirtless and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Both my friend and I are pretty sensitive to smoke due to allergies and asthma, so we sat outside as long as possible before actually going inside the boat. We spend the evening chatting with our host and I excused myself to “facetime with my mom,” when in reality I was desperately attempting to find a hostel with open space. Our host seemed nice enough, although he was considerably older than he’d seemed from our previous conversations and looked like he’d been in his fair share of fights. He probably drank 4-5 beers in the hour we were there before we turned in for the night (to his twin sized bed, which my friend and I shared while he slept on the couch).
We woke up in the morning and decided we would tell him a friend has offered her apartment in Shoreditch for us to stay in. The “bedroom” and “living room” of the boat were just separated by a curtain, so we were basically talking in whispers. Through the curtain, he offers us both breakfast, which I turned down but my friend said she would have a cup of tea. We packed up our stuff and were getting ready to leave when he pulled aside the curtain and gave my friend her tea… completely naked. And due to the lack of visible tanlines, he looked like probably spent a considerable bit of time naked.
My friend took her tea and closed the curtain again, and we proceeded to pack at double speed, not saying a word but both understanding that we needed to GTFO. It was about fifteen minutes before we got our things packed up and figured out what excuse to give this guy as to why were leaving with all of our stuff. When we went into the living room, he was sitting on the couch spread eagle, frank and beans displayed proudly for us. Of course, I tried to avert my eyes as much as possible, but this dude’s flaccid dong was pretty enormous and hard to miss. He asked if we wanted to stay for a little while and we gave him a bullshit excuse and booked it out of there.
We spent the entire walk back to the train station half laughing and half crying because it was so goddamn weird. Still one of the weirdest experiences of my life, and my friend and I both vowed to never tell our parents since they would probably never let us go anywhere again.
TL;DR: Went to London, stayed in an ashtray of a houseboat, host aggressively displayed his giant dong.
There are a whole bunch more of these stories over on an AskReddit thread, and you can read them all by CLICKING HERE. Some of them felt too long to include here, others were too raunchy. So if you want to keep reading then just follow that link!
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