The French are whingers. Yanks are too fat to fit in the shower. And you’ll never guess the truth about Germans!
A B&B landlady’s wonderfully indiscreet revelations about her foreign guests...
SNOTTY, I think, is the best way to describe the review I was reading. It was rude, imperious and, most importantly, totally unfair.
‘Nobody to help us with our luggage,’ it read. ‘Breakfast poor quality. Wi-Fi intermittent. A hair in the shower.’ I bristled with indignation.
Then I played a little game I’ve invented in the three years I’ve been an Airbnb landlady, renting out my neat, clean and tastefully decorated en-suite spare bedroom for a bit of extra cash. I tried to guess from where in the world my dissatisfied guests hailed.
French or Dutch was my guess. If I had to choose, I’d say French. They tend to be the ones who complain about food. The Dutch have a thing about linen.
A quick scroll down the page and, bingo! Spot on again. I was getting good at this.
It’s incredibly un-PC, and I know that all of the beautifully behaved, polite and grateful Dutch and French visitors to our shores will be deeply offended. But I’d say there is an awful lot that defines our world’s nations that only a landlady like me would appreciate.
Perhaps because I live in Oxford, which is now a truly international city, I have welcomed — if that’s the right word — more than 500 guests from all over the world, aged from 16 to over 80. They have been of all colours, races, income groups and sexual orientations.
I’ve had gay couples, lesbian couples, married couples, unmarried couples, couples having secret affairs, honeymoon couples, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, grandparents and grandchildren, visiting academics, people coming for job and university interviews, sightseers, Harry Potter fans and visitors paying homage to literary heroes such as Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, all of whom lived and worked in Oxford.
It’s given me an anthropological education second to none.
Since Airbnb began life as a modest spare-room service in 2008, it has expanded into every country in the world, and become a multi-billiondollar global industry.
In March 2017, the company was valued at $31billion (£23.9billion), with its three American founders, Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia, sitting pretty on fortunes of more than $1 billion (£770 million) each, and they are only in their 30s.
Well, I’m certainly not raking it in on that scale by charging £65 a night for a single occupancy and £80 for a couple — with a continental breakfast thrown in — but I am getting a fascinating insight into the quirks, eccentricities and vagaries of the people who occupy our planet.
So allow me, if you will, to present my personal guide to the human race, courtesy of Airbnb.
The Chinese are the world’s shopaholics. My most frequent guests by far have been the Chinese who, while usually small themselves, arrive with huge tin trunks, which they lug up three flights of stairs.
WHEN I ask what they will be doing in Oxford, they reply, somewhat shamefacedly: ‘Bicester.’ Yes, forget the dreaming spires, the museums, the art galleries, the beautiful old churches; they have come purely to go shopping at Bicester Village, the biggest designer outlet in Europe.
They then stuff those tin trunks full of clothes to take back to China, often to sell. I watch them return every evening, literally creaking under the weight of the stiff designer clothes bags that they haul up to their room. They resemble Christmas trees, there are that many things hanging off them.
Mostly, they hardly speak any English, but rely on their phones to translate for them. Often, I’ll enter the dining room and a phone is thrust in my face with ‘can I borrow umbrella?’ or ‘toothpaste?’ written on it. It always makes me laugh.
Numerically, the Americans come a close second and they are a mixed bunch. Many are elderly couples, often in their 80s, who have come to visit as many stately homes as they can cram in during their stay.
They hire huge cars, which they then can’t manoeuvre down our narrow streets, and our roundabouts utterly defeat them.
They are often physically enormous, and admit one reason they picked my place is because they can’t get into the showers in standard hotels.
THEN there are the food faddists, again mostly Americans. I’ve had glutenfree, lactose-intolerant, vegan, dairy-free, sugar-free and, of course, those who are allergic to nuts. They carefully pick all of the nuts out of their breakfast granola before gingerly splashing on their unsweetened almond milk, while sipping on their own herbal teas.
How do they get so fat? As a world mystery, it’s up there with the building of the pyramids or Stonehenge. I simply cannot work it out.
The Dutch, in my experience, are on the whole a fussy and complaining bunch.
One middle-aged guest kept griping that the sheets weren’t clean, even when I had just got them out of the machine. To keep her happy, I went to Sainsbury’s and bought some new bedlinen, opening the packet right in front of her.
The Dutch also often leave grudging reviews saying there were cobwebs on the ceiling or too many stairs. Sorry, but I can’t reduce the number of stairs. And as for those cobwebs — I swear they wait until they hear a Dutch accent before springing up.
Scandinavians are frequent visitors and, it seems, they are all divorced. I’ve never had a married one. They speak excellent English and leave grateful reviews.
Truly, some guests expect the Ritz or Claridge’s. I get couples in their 30s complaining that I, a single lady in my 70s, don’t offer to drag their suitcases up the stairs for them.
I feel like saying they can always go up the road to the Randolph, a fullservice hotel, for £300 a night, with porters galore. But sarcasm is never a good idea.
Gay couples, of whom I have hosted several, are great fun — chatty, lively and often deliciously bitchy. Especially about one another. We have a lot of knockabout laughs at each other’s expense over breakfast.
I remember one lively couple, who were going to a wedding, who seemed to do nothing but trade insults their whole stay.
Australians live up to their cliché and tend to be loud, brash and, often, very large. ‘We are the largest people in the world,’ they say cheerfully as I worry about my beds collapsing. They are also enormous fun. I forget I’m the landlady sometimes, it feels like I’m hosting a big, jolly party.
Many guests spring surprises. My
latest visitor, a high-powered executive working in Brussels with a wife and family, said as he tucked into bagels, cream cheese and strawberry jam: ‘I used to be a monk, you know,’ and added, ‘It was a wonderful experience, much like being an astronaut. You are up in the clouds all the time.’
He must have crashed back to earth working for the EU.
Another rich-looking guest from the South of England told me he and his wife had adopted five children in a job lot, all from the same mother. And father? ‘No idea,’ he said.
Nigerians, I have found, are clean and tidy, and extremely appreciative. One repeat visitor always leaves reviews which he signs off ‘with respect and admiration’, which is lovely.
But the best guests, by far, are the Germans. They are usually visiting for conferences or to write books, and they tend to leave glowing reviews.
And, contrary to their reputation, they have a sense of humour. A middle-aged couple had booked to stay for two weeks and we got chatting. The man said: ‘This is my first marriage, but for my wife I am number three. I think she was running out of options.’
Who are the biggest misers? Well, two Malaysian women booked last year but five of them turned up on the doorstep. ‘There are only two beds,’ I pointed out. ‘Oh, we have sleeping bags,’ they replied, and when I demurred, they said: ‘Only for one night, only for one night.’
I gave in, and next morning five women trooped down, all in headscarves and long skirts, after what must have been a very uncomfortable night indeed. I thought it was a one-off, but my fellow Airbnb landlords and landladies across the world tell me this is a common, cheeky little dodge among people from that corner of the world.
Do they top and tail? Draw straws for who gets the floor? Swap in the middle of the night? I’d love to know.
With British people, I’d say there was a definite North/South divide. Northerners rarely complain and they like my place so much that they often book repeat visits. Middle-aged, middle-class Southern women are terrible whingers.
Generally speaking, I would rather have Germans than the British any day.
Friends always ask me whether I worry about being alone in my house with strange, single men, but I can honestly state that all of my male guests have been perfect gentlemen and absolutely impeccably behaved.
I have to admit, though, that I have a nicely growing collection of discarded men’s underpants in my linen cupboard.
Being an Airbnb host in your own home gives you a window to the world outside, but it is surprisingly hard work.
I seem to spend my life washing and ironing bedlinen and towels and I am always rushing to the shops to stock up on bread, jam, coffee, wet wipes and toilet rolls.
AFINNISH guest who stayed a few months ago had an Airbnb business herself. She totally sympathised with me when I complained how I could be bleaching, vacuuming and scrubbing 24 hours a day, and the place would still never be clean enough.
There is always that one rogue hair that eludes me, which some guest (usually Dutch or French) will find.
And those complaints, apart from being utterly infuriating, get you in trouble. A one-star rating by a guest will get you a ticking-off from Airbnb HQ.
And they’re always looking for ways to get you to reduce your prices. If, for instance, there is an opening in your calendar, it will trigger an email saying ‘turn lookers into bookers. Reduce your prices by 10 per cent to get more bookings’.
Or, if potential guests look at my advert and end up booking somewhere cheaper, I will get an email to the effect that: ‘Two guests have just booked a listing nearby at £42 cheaper. Consider reducing your prices.’
I never do discounts. For one thing, I don’t want to host cheap people. For another, I hate this endless haggling and discounting — an American import we can do without. While the Airbnb founders are trying to get hosts to offer a five-star experience for a pittance, the company keeps raking in ever more billions from all over the world.
Hosting Airbnb guests has been fun, sometimes nerve-racking, and always extremely hard work, but I am closing my listing from October. The main reason for this is the crippling tax I get clobbered with (I can currently earn up to £7,500 a year tax-free under the Rent a Room Scheme, but Government proposals are likely to scrap that).
But I also I feel like a break from all that scrubbing and roguehair-hunting.
I shall miss coming down each morning at breakfast time, not knowing what language will greet me or what tale from a distant corner of the world I will carry with me for the rest of the day.
And you Germans. I will miss you, sorely. Maybe it’s time I started looking on Airbnb and paid you a little visit myself . . .