Bad Review Blues on Airbnb
A few weekends ago I was lucky enough to have a Teacher’s Work Day on a Friday, so I booked a mini-vacation to St. Augustine only 90 minutes from where I live. A friend came and split the cost with me so we decided to go a little pricier and get my favorite amenity: a hot tub.
We arrived on Friday morning and our host, Pat (not her real name), was a sweet old lady who encouraged us to pull the car forward about 20 feet because of a 20 minute story about an osprey who had taken up residence in the tree above and would have ruined our car. She was a bit more chatty than I prefer in an Airbnb host, and she wasn’t wearing a mask, but she seemed like a lonely old lady so we were friendly and let her show us the 3 buttons on the hot tub like we never would’ve been able to function without her.
Finally, deterred by the stairs up to our second story guest apartment over the garage, she left us be. We spent less than an hour in the room, just enough time to unpack, eat a snack, and get ready to head out. We had a great afternoon in downtown St. Augustine, only a 15 minute walk from the apartment, and came back to the room to change and finally try out the hot tub around 10 PM.
In hindsight, the way the backyard/pool area is set up between the house and the guest apartment is prime for echoing and magnifying sound, but at the time, we were brand new to the area, and we just didn’t know. My friend and I brought a bottle of champagne and two plastic cups down and enjoyed talking and being silly for all of 10 minutes before disaster struck. I noticed a flashlight shaking and waving over by the main house and pointed it out to my friend, but even then, we didn’t grasp what it would mean and I continued to expound on the finer points of the lyrics to an LMFAO song I had loved in high school. Before long, Pat appeared, huffing and puffing and completely enraged.
She berated us for being loud, “partying,” and waking up the whole neighborhood. It was not even 10:30 PM on a Friday and we’d had no idea that the sound carried, but we were immediately embarrassed and apologetic, promising to keep it down. This was not enough for Pat. She held up our (still mostly full) bottle of champagne, shook her head, and demanded we get out of the hot tub. She chased us back up the stairs to our apartment shouting things like “I thought you were nice people”!
My first reaction upon getting back in the room was guilt and embarrassment. My friend and I immediately started scouring the room and the Airbnb listing for rules or a set of quiet hours that we must have overlooked. We were only two people trying to hear each other over the sound of jet bubbles, we may have been a little annoying, but there was absolutely no behavior that a simple text message request to quiet down wouldn’t have solved! The word “quiet” was mentioned nowhere in the listing. If it had been 1 AM, a weeknight, if there had been specific mention of quiet hours, or if Pat had already warned us once to quiet down, maybe her reaction would’ve been understandable, but it was just a simple mistake. My emotions quickly morphed into anger.
I spent the rest of the trip angry. I wanted to leave that very night but we had spent over $300 on two nights with a hot tub and my friend and I didn’t want to waste our money, especially not to Pat’s benefit. I spent the entire night awake, steaming, fantasizing about what I would say to her in the morning and the review I was going to leave her on Airbnb.
In the morning, Pat apologized. I didn’t even have to wring it out of her; I just woke up to a message that said by the time she had realized she was overreacting, she had already chased us out of the hot tub. She admitted that she had thought we were drinking too much (not her business at all!!) and asked only that if we were to use the hot tub again to please keep the noise level down. If only she could have been so reasonable the night before, because there was no way either of us was going near that hot tub, or her, ever again. I had to let my friend reply because my anger with Pat had not subsided and put a damper over the entire (expensive) weekend.
But that brings me to my dilemma. A few days have passed now and I am less angry. I went through Pat’s reviews and she has a solid 4.9 rating from over 300 guests. Being the outlier, I keep looking for our fault in the situation, but even Pat herself admitted she’d overreacted and her behavior ruined a lot of my vacation. Do I leave her an honest review?
What would you do? Have you ever left a bad Airbnb review before?
