Julian Sage:                         00:00                     In this episode, we’re talking all about handling guests and what happens if they are upset or angry and then reviews as well. So stay tuned.

Julian Sage:                         00:10                     Vacation rental machine helps hosts just like you learn how to start, grow and scale your short term rental business. The show’s all about creating systems that help you automate your business, give any more time and money freedom. If you’re ready to start living the vacation rental life, then subscribe to this podcast today, come and join us on our Facebook group, the host nation where we’ll be talking about starting automating and scaling a short term rental business. Now onto the show.

Julian Sage:                         00:36                     Hey, what is going on? Host nation? I am with Jon Bell and today we’re talking about bad guests, unhappy guests and their negative reviews and how you handle them. So obviously this is a hospitality business. This is not a real estate business. So when you are dealing with things like guests, you’re not going to be able to please everybody. There’s just some people that they are just inherently angry and unhappy. Some are very nitpicky, so that’s just part of the business. But you also have to realize that this is customer service and that we have to come from a customer service standpoint. So being able to handle a negative guest or an angry guest is really important and you can actually do things to be able to save yourself from getting these negative reviews on your profile. And because this is such a review driven business, this is such a key part of your business. So obviously Jon, when you’re dealing with a lot of homes and dealing with a lot of different types of guests, you’re going to come across these types of people. How do you handle a person that maybe is just coming right off the bat or that you know is going to be a troublesome type of guests?

Jon Bell:                               01:39                     You know, it’s sometimes tough when you already predict that it’s going to be a troublesome guest. Tact really is very important. You want to make sure that you are in better terms behind the pendulum. If you don’t know what that means, I think you guys need to Google it. It is actually a technique that is used that puts you in a passive state and not necessarily in front of the wrecking ball. You don’t want to be in front of the wrecking ball, so you just want to make sure that you can answer or accommodate the guest in whatever they technically need as much as you can. If it’s outlandish. Sometimes you just have to say, “I’m sorry, I cannot.”

Julian Sage:                         02:20                     So Jon, can you give us some examples of a person that you know is going to be right off the bat like very troublesome guests and how you handle that type of situation?

Jon Bell:                               02:28                     Sometimes it’s easy to catch those prima donna type guests and sometimes you don’t catch them until they’re already in your space. But the best way that I can deal with it is I can handle what I can handle. And other times I can’t. I fall on my sword. In one particular situation, I had a guest, a brand new property. This is literally the first guest in this place. There was a little flaw. The blinds were not fully installed in all of the main space living rooms. So the bedrooms were covered and no blinds on the main living area, which typically in my case, I like that because it’s open. I don’t really care about people looking in stuff like that. The place is so big that they can’t seem quite so much in general. It’s also elevated to the third floor. This guest taped up trash bags to close up the window.

Jon Bell:                               03:26                     Now, how did I handle that? One, they wanted me to come tomorrow to install blinds. I thought that was a crazy request because I can’t come tomorrow. I’m putting the blinds for this big window. I mean this is probably a six foot by eight foot window. They don’t have these blinds at Lowe’s that I can just go and get and install. So it was really unrealistic for me to say, yes, I can get somebody there. What I told her was the truth that I couldn’t get anybody there, but that if I could that I would let her know and that we would definitely take care of the issue. What I did in that case, I did send her a welcome gift. If you listened to some of the past videos, you know that I don’t send or have welcome gifts in my places at all times.

Jon Bell:                               04:13                     I use them almost now for a “I’m sorry” present that just reiterates like “We just want to make sure you’re comfortable. We added something a little sweet.” Maybe this helps change the tone of the entire reservation. She did thank me for that and for that request, she didn’t mention anything else. When she checked out, I then found that there were trash bags and stuff taped to the windows just to black out the light and when I say they blocked out all light, they put trash bags over the windows that had blinds. So when I removed the tape, can you imagine what happened? The paint peeled because they taped it up with duct tape. Now, that’s definitely a bad review, at least for me to them, but I’m sure that she would also leave a bad review because I lacked in an area that she thought was very important and that technically was privacy. So in that whole case, I used smartbnb to submit the review very, very last minute. My other automations that asked for a five star review still went out. This guest did end up giving me a review. The review was a four star review, but that was fine because I expected a little bit lower. I gave her in return a four star review because she messed up my walls. I also just charged her her security deposit for this property too; free patch, all those seams that she left from removing the tape.

Julian Sage:                         05:57                     I think that this is a really good episode, Jon, to really just showcase that this is not real estate. This is very much a hospitality business and if you’re coming into this business with the mindset that you can just start making money and it’ll just be a cash engine, there’s going to be weird situations like this and you have to be able to handle them personally. Not all of this is going to be able to be an automated type of system. This isn’t passive. This is very, how are you going to be handling a customer? A guest that is maybe going outside of what the normal guests would do. So Jon, one of the key things that you did mention in a previous video, but I want you to hit again because I think it is very important is that automated messaging, that last minute review and how does that strategy work with let’s say this type of situation?

Jon Bell:                               06:40                     It works perfectly with this situation. It’s really about their placement of the review. If you know you’re going to get a bad review, you don’t want that to be the first thing that people see when they go onto your listing and they see it and you just, this person just stayed three days ago. I pushed that review out as far as I can and hopes that I have other guests that are going to submit more favorable reviews on top of when this review is going to go. The reviews are going to be ordered by stay, so that means that this person being the very first guest is going to be the first review that I get which means it is at the bottom of the list. The bottom of the list, I’ve had three other people that come in. Those other three reviews will be right in front of that one. This would be perfect if I had more people to come in, more reviews because then I can get that review off the first page completely. That’s really what that’s about is you’re just trying to show your front face as positive as you can.

Julian Sage:                         07:42                     So question of the day, what has been your experience with unhappy guests and how have you handled it? Leave it in the comment section down below, and with all that being said, host nation. Keep on hosting.

Julian Sage:                         07:53                     Hope you hosts found value in this episode. If you did, please go on over to iTunes and leave us a review. That would greatly support the show. If you’d like to connect with Jon, the community, and I then go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation.

Julian Sage:                         08:05                     Talk to you hosts in the next episode. Keep on hosting.