Confessions of an Airbnb host

Police have smashed down her door and she’s had to do endless ironing, but Liz Hodgkinson welcomes the strangers in her home

Most days I can be seen dashing away with the smoothing iron. When that chore is finished, I’m shoving armfuls of bed linen into the washing machine, changing sheets, cleaning out lavatories and wiping down the shower – all day and every day. So, welcome to my brandnew career as a laundress and chambermaid or, as it is sometimes known, being an Airbnb host. Over the past six months, I have welcomed more than 100 people from all over the world into my home, through the auspices of this website which now has nearly a million listings in 33,000 cities. My current guest is a German professor, here for a month. During some of the time he is with me I will also be hosting his wife and adult daughter. Over breakfast we chat about opera, film, physics and computer science. He speaks excellent English, as do most of my foreign visitors. Airbnb began life in 2008 as a sofa-surfing website whereby students and others could, for a small sum, crash down in people’s living rooms for the night. Gradually, it became more upmarket until gracious ladies like myself started opening up their lovely homes as a kind of ad hoc guesthouse. Nowadays, the majority of hosts are over-55s whose children have left home and who now have spare rooms, and perhaps spare capacity, to entertain strings of complete strangers. We are more intimate, more welcoming, than a hotel and, of course, vastly cheaper. Possibly because we are amateurs, we go that extra mile to make sure our guests are comfortable and happy. My guests have tea, coffee and biscuits in the room, plus an iron and ironing board and hairdryer. Basic toiletries are in the bathroom and my God, do they go through the loo paper. Mostly, I have to say, it works well. I provide breakfast in the kitchen but do not offer cooking facilities. Many potential guests ask if they can cook or invite friends or relatives around to dinner and the answer is a resounding no. Nor can they sit in my living room to watch television. They are emphatically not one of the family, and what I offer is a purely business arrangement. I do wince, though, when guests lug in huge tin trunks and bang them against the sides of my newly painted walls. I do not allow small children into my all-white apartment