Same day booking over New Years

[John Underwood]

I received a booking same day request from the Airbnb platform for my Lake House.

Yes I was concerned.

It was a 4 day booking.

What happened was that the people were in Atlanta on their way to SC from Florida and they received a cancelation on the house they were heading to due to frozen water pipes that had ruptured.

They pulled over for an hour and a half and scrambled to find some place else. 

They didn't read much of my ad, but I got multiple text messages from them saying how happy they were with the house and they wanted to come back when it was warm!

I saw on the news that plumbers were overloaded with water pipe repairs. So take care of preventative maintenance such as winterizing your house. Pipe insulation, heat trace tape, leaving water running in the sink can all help prevent damage from a frozen pipe.

Same thing was going on in the smokey mountains, luckily we didn't have any issues there either. There was some rolling power outages, but they didn't last long. 

[Wilson Hunter]

Quote from @John Underwood:

Quote from @Wilson Hunter:

During the 75 minute rolling power outage on Christmas Eve my guest packed up and left the cabin and asked Airbnb for a full refund. I was able to communicate with them and talk them into coming back, and they ultimately left a 5-star review, but it was a rough situation considering the high dollar holiday booking put at risk for something outside my control that affected the whole area. Last year I had a couple stay there for 2 days of no power in the January blizzard because they wanted to hang out in a snowy cabin in front of a fireplace and loved it, never asking for anything… As a guest I’d be somewhere in the middle of these two in my expectations.

Good job on talking them into coming back. How did that conversation go?

I sent them a pic of the Sevier Co Electric power map and explained the situation. I also offered to comp them any nights in a hotel that power went out for (which would have been better than doing a big refund for the stay). Ultimately the power didn’t go out again so I didn’t need to do that.