All Forum Posts by: Jenessa NeSmith

Alright, so there is a happy ending...after speaking with a number of different Airbnb representatives I finally got to talk to a supervisor's supervisor.  They are refunding all of the money but not going through the resolution center to ask the guest for it.  I have been told that he is going to be banned from the platform, and assured that my name won't come up as the reason why. 

It took a little bit, but glad Airbnb ended up doing the right thing. 

@Shawn Ward  The guest didn't have any other reviews on Airbnb.  Airbnb really encourages instant book and rewards hosts that use it by putting them higher up in the search rankings, so we opted to keep instant book on.  We've had many other guests without any reviews over the two years we have been hosting, and up until now they have been amazing, clean, and respectful.  Unfortunately you know what they say about one bad apple...

Lessons learned: We have turned off instant book for guests who do not have reviews.  This way we can look at the person's profile and choose to accept or not, and will err on the side of caution if we have a gut feeling that a guest may not be a good fit.  We will no longer be accepting reservations from people from Omaha.  

Ok, thanks everyone for all the advice and useful information. For those you that are following along, here are some updates :) Tips for hosts: apparently you have to explicitly state in your house rules that the guest agrees to that no smoking means no smoking anything. Luckily we had just recently changed ours from “no smoking” to “no smoking, no underage drinking, and no use of any illegal drugs of any kind”, but otherwise Airbnb wouldn’t even consider covering us. I talked to the narcotics department this morning, and the officer on our case said that based on the time frame and evidence they found on the scene, the guests were only smoking meth and not manufacturing it. I am still going to test the area with a kit myself for piece of mind, but the local expert on the issues says I don’t need to worry about contamination as long as I have thoroughly cleaned all the surfaces in the house. So that’s a relief. Airbnb still hasn’t contacted us back after we sent all the photo evidence and the police report number. Last time we spoke with a representative he told us the only way to get any money back from the guest is to file it through the resolution center, and our argument was that we don’t want the guest to know that we snitched on him and don’t want to ask a meth head that knows where we live for money. I don’t know if the $500 or so we would get from him would be worth the anxiety. We are getting a security system installed Wednesday and I am purchasing a gun, so maybe I will feel more confident about confronting him once I have these protections in place. I am hoping Airbnb will cover us under their host guarantee without making us go through the resolution center, but there is a lot of red tape with that so I am not holding my breath. We have STR Insurance but the deductible is 1,000 so wouldn’t be much help. I also hope that Airbnb will ban this guest from the platform so that this doesn’t happen to another host. I have a suspicion that even if they didn’t cook the meth at our place, they are cooking at other airbnbs in our area. So right now, damage is around $500, and we will probably end up just cutting our losses. I am glad that they didn’t do more extensive damage than that, but this whole process has been emotionally draining and made me consider giving up on Airbnb completely as they have demonstrated they don’t really care about their hosts safety. It could have definitely been a lot worse.

@Mindy Jensen  Do you know what kind of company I should contact to get it tested for meth? I tried calling around and searching online but I didn't have much success.  Do you have any idea if an at-home kit would be reliable? 

 There were definitely drugs all over the place, but I am not familiar with those types of substances so I have no idea what kind it was.  Does anyone know if something like heroin require an extensive clean up? The police took the drugs, so I am going to call and see if they have been identified. 
 

I don't want to go through unnecessary remediation, especially as Airbnb is being really unsupportive, however it is our primary residence so I don't want to expose my family or our future guests to anything harmful.  We've got the listing blocked for the next couple days while we try to figure it out, and I am hoping that Airbnb will pay for the missed income.   The guests were only there for two nights...ugh :(

@Eric Siebert  Airbnb really wants hosts to use the instant book, and will boost your rankings in search results if you have it turned on.  I've gone almost 2 years having instant book on all 3 of my listings, and this is the first really bad scenario I've experienced.  Airbnb did add an option where you can turn off instant book for users who don't have recommendations, and we turned that on as a result of our experience.  I want to give people who are new to Airbnb a chance, but at this point I would rather have a vacancy than what I experienced this week. 

Airbnb requires a verified state ID to book, so if they block someone from the platform completely then he shouldn't be able to turn around and make a new profile.  However, that doesn't stop his friends from creating accounts for the same purpose, or him using a fake ID to create a profile, but at least it is better than nothing.

Chris Egan that was my thought as well. Clearly we own the property and live right above them...dude we can smell your weed and weird chemical smells!! Besides leaving evidence of manufacturing and paraphernalia (like bent spoons, snapped rubber bands, used needles, burnt Tupperware with white powdered residue, empty spray paint cans) They also literally left actual drugs everywhere. Baggies of drugs in the trash. White residue on almost every hard surface, little white rocks just laying out. I don’t know a lot about these types of drugs so I don’t even know what it is, but it looks like they sprinkled sea salt on everything. So yeah, either super messed up or super dumb (probably both) I’m really frustrated because Airbnb is saying they have to wait until they hear his side of the story before they can take any action. Surprise, he’s not answering their calls! Now he is staying with another host in the area and putting them in danger. I would understand if this guy just stole some towels or whatever, but we sent Airbnb pictures of all these hard drugs in our apt. Oh and he took off with our keys. We called Airbnb the first night we smelled smoke/weed and then once again after we found the paraphernalia and again after we found actual illegal drugs. Airbnb advised us not to call the police and to let them handle it...yeah I’m just gonna sit here with a bunch of illegal drugs in my residence and not call it in? And now a local meth gang (are they called that? Lol) knows that two females live by themselves and where our house is. We have changed the locks but are amping up our security system and purchasing a gun.

Ugh fleas are no fun! I also check obsessively for bed bugs. Thanks for the advice, we have started that process. Good call on the Kilz So Airbnb suggested we look through the trash to see if we could find any more evidence. We came across several used needles, and multiple plastic baggies with little white rocks inside. There were also little white rocks and residue on pretty much every hard surface of the apartment. After googling the name of the guest we found an article where he had been arrested a few years back in connection to a meth ring. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with a trash can full of drugs and used needles, so we ended up calling the police and filing a report. We now have a case file we can report to Airbnb, and have pictures documenting everything. I am hoping they will compensate us for the two days we had to block due to needing time to deep clean, and they also broke one of our beds and didn’t return the keys. I am a little nervous reporting them to Airbnb because they are from Omaha and they know where we live. We’ve changed the locks already and I’ve ordered an additional three security cameras that we will be setting up in the next few days. I’m upset with Airbnb that they didn’t support us asking them to leave after the first night of cig/weed smoke inside the house. And then to ask us to dig through the trash to find “evidence” as that was the only way we could prove our case...what if we weren’t paying attention and got poked by a used needle? I mean we have been hosts for two years and these guys just put up a profile. I’ve always been an adamant supporter of Airbnb but this makes me deeply consider switching to long term or mid term rentals. We have now changed it so that in order to book with us you have to be recommended by another host. We also upped our price. I don’t know what effect these things will have on our overall bookings, but it’s scary that local meth heads now know that we are two women living alone in our house and I hope they aren’t looking for any sort of retribution :/

Is there any chance that we can be banned from renting out places on Airbnb because of this incident?  Has anyone had any experience with this in long term rentals, what happens if you report it?

@Eric Siebert I totally agree...the only times we have ever had problems has been when people from Omaha are staying with us.  I wish there was a function on Airbnb that we could block people from a certain area.

My wife and I are considering turning off instantbook because of this incident, which is really unfortunate. :(

I want to preface this by saying we've been Airbnb hosts for almost 2 years, and this is the first time we have had a huge problem like this.  

For the past two nights we have had people staying in our basement which is a mother-in-law apartment below our primary residence with its own separate entrance.  The guests are from Omaha, which made me suspicious already.  We smelled cigarette and weed smoke on the first night despite our clear no smoking indoors/no illegal drugs rule, and our messages asking them to please refrain from smoking indoors had gone unanswered.  We called Airbnb to see if we could get them out early. Airbnb said we had to have proof they were smoking, and that we had to physically go talk to them before Airbnb would step in. So we went down and talked to them, explaining that the smoke goes up through the vents and bothers us and our other guests, which is why we have a no smoking rule.  We video taped the conversation where he had admitted to smoking and said it wouldn't happen again (I didn't even bring up the weed issue)

At 2 AM, sure enough cig/weed smoke drifts up through the vents.  We had already sent Airbnb the video, and were planning on taking picture of what we found (we were assuming we would find evidence of cig butts in the trash) and we were going to charge them an extra $200 for cleaning, and the fact that we had to block the next day in order to clean everything.  In the grand scheme of things, not a huge deal. 

HOWEVER, my wife went downstairs to begin cleaning the property and take pictures of the evidence of smoking...and instead finds evidence that these guys were cooking METH.  Burnt tupperware containers with a white powdery residue and empty spray paint cans.  I am not a meth expert, but after doing some googling I am pretty sure that is what they were doing.

The guy we spoke to at Airbnb is of course out of the office until tomorrow, so they are refusing to do anything until he comes back.  

In the meantime, should we file a police report? Can the police test for meth in the walls? If we file a police report will we face any repercussions or will it "brand our house"?

Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks