Originally posted by @John D.:
@Lee L. you come across as tremendously defensive. That does not bode well for those that operate short-term rentals. It's a customer-centric business, and an unwillingness to gracefully accept opinions we disagree with does not correlate with future success. You can think someone is wrong, but still accept that may have a point. Disagreement resulting in a knee-jerk public (or even private) response will not benefit you in this industry.
Well you are entitled to your opinion John, we shall see about my future customer service success as all my bookings start in December, but anyone who has been unpleasant to me seems to believe they have some crystal ball and that this message board is being conflated with real life. In any event, no offense to you, but I will pass on further opinions, yours included, I have gotten a lot of great feedback, and a bit of nonsense and trolling as well, and I have looked but can't seem to find a way to either delete this thread or shut it down to further comments.
I actually got two more bookings since this thread went up and I am going to implement some of the productive suggestions I received. If I may, since you are all about apparently accepting when someone has a point, let me ask you, out of all the people who wrote in this thread, I had unpleasant interactions with 3, and wrote the others in a neutral way or with thanks to them for their help, and the 3 I had issues with were objectively not being helpful, and as far as I am concerned were actually going out of their way to create controversy, something commonly seen on message boards. I am genuinely confused how I can have mostly pleasant interactions except with people who are intentionally flaming me and somehow that makes me defensive.
I personally tend to think that some people go looking to make trouble, and then they try to get out of the trouble they made by excusing their bad behavior as some sort of "trial by fire" of my customer service skills that I failed. But hey, I am entitled to my opinion too aren't I?