What’s missing? Towels, toilet paper, for starters
Travellers, be aware of this frustrating aspect of renting homes online
When Chelle Neff and her husband, David Neff, travelled from their home in Austin, Texas, to Dallas to visit family over Christmas, they stayed in a onebedroom loft they rented through Airbnb. On the first morning they were there, Chelle Neff stepped out of the shower and looked for a towel. “I was walking around dripping, looking around the bathroom,” said Chelle Neff, 41, the owner of a hair salon. But the only towel-like object she found was a small bath mat draped over the side of the tub. So she dried off with that. “Thank God for the bath mat,” she said. When David Neff took his shower later, he used the mat, too.
Chelle Neff texted the owners about the missing towels and finally received some that evening. When Chelle Neff later posted a review of her stay on the Airbnb website, she awarded the place four out of five stars. “I took a star off,” for the missing towels, she says. “Because that is not cool.”
One of the most frustrating aspects of renting a vacation home online — perhaps second only to a rental not remotely resembling its photos or description — is what is missing. A coffee maker. A cutting board. A sharp knife.
At the vacation rental company HomeAway, missing or shabby sheets and towels are the most common complaints mentioned in customer satisfaction surveys about house amenities, says Karen Fuller, HomeAway’s senior director for global market research. While it may seem obvious that overnight guests would need sheets and towels — and would be unlikely to be bringing their own — Fuller noted that some owners of ski cabins and beach cottages, particularly in places like Cape Cod, don’t provide sheets or charge “linen fees” to rent them. That information might be included in listings for homes, but some visitors “don’t read all the details,” she said.
In surveys conducted last year with customers in the United States, HomeAway identified other specific items travellers expect vacation homeowners to provide. In the kitchen, that’s dish soap, paper towels and dishwasher detergent. HomeAway also found that renters want a high-quality coffee maker like a Keurig or Nespresso. An old-school Mr. Coffee doesn’t cut it, Fuller said. But if there is a simple drip machine, travellers expect to find several extra coffee filters on hand. (Shopping for filters is not a fun vacation excursion.)
In the bathrooms, the non-negotiables are toilet paper and hand soap. That may sound like a no-brainer, but Fuller says that toilet paper — specifically how many rolls to provide — is a hot topic at HomeAway’s Owner’s Summits, periodic gatherings of homeowners who offer properties on HomeAway and the company’s other sites including VRBO and VacationRentals.com.
Fuller’s advice? Multiple rolls for each bathroom.
Airbnb says it doesn’t have data on which missing items drive the most complaints. But it did survey 8,629 travellers in 11 countries last summer to find out which “amenities” they value. The company asked travellers to rank the importance of six “indoor amenities,” including a full kitchen, washer/dryer, high-speed internet and Wi-Fi, and air-conditioning and heat (is heat really an amenity?).
Travellers from Spain, Germany, Canada and China ranked high-speed internet and Wi-Fi as most important. Among vacationers from the U.S. and Australia, air-conditioning and heat was the top response. For outdoor amenities, travellers from the United States, Australia and Canada ranked free parking as most important. Travellers from China, Spain and Italy wanted a pool and hot tub. The survey also asked travellers what most annoys them about holiday rentals. The majority of people ranked “uncomfortable beds and towels” as most bothersome, above small bathrooms or mismatched decor.
Home-sharing companies say they have found that there are certain items that many travellers actually don’t want to use in rentals. In a HomeAway survey, the company asked travellers how they felt about so-called “perishables.” The survey found that 77 per cent of travellers are “uncomfortable” using an open tube of toothpaste and 41 per cent are uncomfortable using an open container of ketchup or mustard. About 56 per cent are squeamish about using an open package of dental floss.
The dental floss statistic, in particular, bewildered Fuller. “Do you think someone used the floss and wound it back in there?” she asked.
Missing items can cause some vacation home renters to get creative. When Kiki Schmalzl and a group of friends sat down to dinner at the house they rented in Seattle last September, the women realized that there was no corkscrew. “We had no way to open the wine,” says Schmalzl, a 49-year-old product manager for a medical device company who lives in Bedford, New Hampshire. So the resourceful Schmalzl took a knife from the kitchen, jammed it through the cork and pushed the cork into the bottle.
“I pretty much demolished it,” she said. “We drank wine with cork in it.”