Airbnb

Our international student, who has been with us since February, went home for the summer holidays (in December!), leaving a hole in our family as well as our finances. She'll be back end of January so we can deal with the family part it, but as for finances we spoke to the university to see if they had any summer students, but they didn't. On a whim, I posted a photo of the room to Airbnb.com. Less than an hour later, I had three guests coming that night!

Of course, Airbnb doesn't let multiple people book the same room--I got separate enquiries from a couple and a single woman. As the eldest child has been staying with her dad for the past six months, I made the command decision to rent it out.  That also meant I had to take out all her stuff and clean it from top to bottom; I had to do the same for the international student, as well.  Did I mention we also had friends coming for dinner that night, and we had put out an open invitation to the community to celebrate Hanukkah with us that evening?

So I spent the next six hours cleaning, doing laundry, making dinner and organising! By the time our Airbnb guest arrived, I was shattered. Worse, my partner was (understandably) upset that I had put all of her daughter's stuff in the garage. I was already shattered and we were bickering all evening.  Hopefully none of the 15-odd guests noticed.

The Airbnb people couldn't have been nicer.  The single girl was a 25-year-old French student spending a year working and travelling in New Zealand. The kids enjoyed her so much, they asked her if she could stay longer!  The Dutch couple were also very nice, but they arrived late and left early so we hardly saw them.  Since then we've hosted around a dozen people, from China to Latvia, who have all been lovely.  We weren't sure how the kids were going to handle it, but they seem to have enjoyed having visitors as much as I have.

Financially it was also quite successful, earning about $800 over the holidays.  (We could have made much more, but it is our holidays as well so we blocked off quite a few days, and turned away several requests because they wanted to stay more than a week and we didn't want to make that kind of commitment.)  As the holidays draw to a close, we have one more couple coming this weekend (from Germany) and then our international student returns on the 29th.

Comparing Airbnb to my B&B days is apples and oranges.  One was a full-time job and I worked hard to make it a 'luxury' experience.  The other was letting people share my home, meet my kids, and have dinner with us.  It was much more laid back, but also much more intimate, and I could get into discussions with guests I could have never done in the B&B.  (The woman from East Germany was particularly fascinating!)  The Airbnb guests were also much more open; they played board games with the kids and watched movies with us.

Of course there are some Airbnb horror stories out there, although all the ones I saw involved rental properties, not family homes, plus each guest has 'reviews' from other hosts and you can reject a reservation request for any reason.  I found it a very positive and rewarding experience, and if you have a spare room (or even a spare sofa!) I highly recommend you sign up and see what happens.  As long as you're honest and set the expectations, your guests will be happy.