Dear Vacation Rental Property Owner

Dear Vacation Rental Property Owner (be you with VRBO, AirBnB, HomeAway, Sabbatical Homes, or Bob’s Pretty-Good Rentals),

There are a few 17 things I would like you to know about the needs and desires of travelers who rent your apartment or home. After several years of renting in both the U.S. and Europe, I find there are quirks or things lacking that, if corrected, would make a huge difference in our comfort level and willingness to return to or refer your property to others. I am not amused by your flea market furnishings or good-enough-for-a-college-student kitchen ware. I am appalled when you ask me to clean, and I am confused by the widely varying approaches to recycling.

1. Put a chair in the bedroom(s) where one can sit to put on shoes and socks. I am short and when I have to sit on a high bed to put on my undies or socks, it’s very uncomfortable. I’m not asking that the bedroom be furnished like Versailles, but a bedroom with only a bed, a small table, and a dim lamp is not really furnished.

   

   OK, nothing this bad, to date, but we’ve had our share of drapes sagging on wire and shades that won’t stay up…others won’t stay down.

2. Make sure things work and are in good repair. Do the curtains, drapes and window blinds hang neatly and are easy to open? We’ve seen cockeyed blinds, drapes where the rod or support is drooping, shutters half falling off the wall. We’ve had a washing machine fail to drain leaving us with a soggy mess. My favorite was the water heater that did not turn itself off and heated water to scalding. The owner’s solution: turn it off during the day and on at bedtime. After all, why would you need hot water during the day?

3. There should be more than two wine glasses in the cabinet. And it would be nice if they matched.

4. 

   We have indeed found broken glasses, hidden in closets by prior guests.

   The coffee pot must work. We checked into one apartment in Italy where they had the teeny tiniest single-serving Moka pot but the gas burners were too big for it. I could not set it properly on the grate over the burner: it fell through! So no coffee in the morning, which is one of the main reasons we like to rent apartments. If you supply a drip coffee maker, make sure there are filters. I’ve had to make them out of paper towels, which of course I purchased myself because there were none.

5. When we check in at midnight to your check-yourself-in-no-one-will-meet-you-there’s-a-lockbox apartment, the toilet paper supply should consist of more than 12 sheets on the last roll in the place, and there should be hand soap. We have had to buy these items in several apartments. I don’t expect fancy little bottles of shampoo and lotion, but some hand soap would be nice in the bathroom.

   

   Please supply a spare few toilet rolls. Arriving late one night we found our apartment down to a few precious sheets.

6. Ditto in the kitchen: dish soap, paper towels, a hand towel or two. I should not have to buy dishwasher detergent or even soap for washing dishes in the sink.

7. I am happy to run the dishwasher as I leave the premises, but please don’t expect me to strip the bed and wash the sheets and towels, too. It is YOUR responsibility to clean the place for the next guests, not mine. In one Portland, Oregon apartment, we were asked to strip the bed and start the washer while paying over $200 a night.

8. 

   Believe-it-or-not, we actually make our bed wherever we are staying, but I do not think I should have to wash the linens.

   In conjunction with #7, do not charge extra for cleaning. It’s really irritating to have to pay a cleaning fee when the rent is already $200 a night! Build it into the price. Maybe give a break for staying 4 or more nights since you won’t have to clean the place as often, or charge a little more for short stays to cover those times when it has to be cleaned two or three times in a week. And reasonable, please! I pay €48.00 a week to have my 1000 square foot apartment cleaned in Rome. Why does it cost €110.00 to clean your 600 square foot vacation let?

   

   Mommy Dearest would be appalled! So am I…

9. Have some decent hangers in the closets and plenty of them. No wire hangers from the cleaners. Go to IKEA or Target and load up on nice wooden, or even heavy-duty plastic, hangers. If your guests are staying a month, they will need more than 6 bent wire hangers.

10. We cannot intuit your city’s recycling and trash disposal rules, especially when we don’t speak the language. Explain the particulars and make sure your guests can comply without too much trouble. If you need to use pink bags for recyclable plastics and gray ones for garbage, supply them. We stayed in a place in Sorrento where the recycler only picked up plastics — in special green bags — on Thursdays and the plastics could only be set out on Wednesday evenings after 10:00PM.

    We were also admonished to remove all trash and recycling when we exited on Saturday. Since there was no place to put the plastics on Saturday we could not possibly comply. (See #8: it should be YOUR job to remove the trash anyway.)

11. 

    Expired food has to go.

    Periodically clean out the condiments and groceries left by prior guests. (Ironic that you want us to recycle and clean but you leave expired food in the house.) I never use the coffee left behind because it usually smells old. In a place we stayed last summer my husband tossed out a box of Cheerios that had an expiration date in 2013. It was July 2015 when he did this. Ric now makes it a habit to clean out the cupboards wherever we go. It’s a public service. Maybe you can label these items with the date you find them and if they are still there in 30 days, toss them out. 

12. Reboot your router now-and-again. It helps the WiFi to function. By the way, strong, reliable WIFI is more important than almost any other amenity. We can no longer manage without it. It is the 21st century equivalent of “Direct Dial Phones!” in mid-20th-century motel rooms. We don’t need no stinkin’ phone, but we require WIFI. 

13. Sort through the travel brochures and books left behind and only make available the latest and most reliable information. No sense leaving the Rick Steves’ 2010 Italy guide out when it’s 2015. Things change. The last guest’s crumpled map of downtown is not appealing. We’ve seen piles of tourist info in apartments that would make kindling for a bonfire. Maybe the visitors’ center can give you a stack of new maps to hand out. 

14. When I wake up in the dark in a new place, I cannot remember what direction the bathroom is. Put a nightlight in each bathroom and supply a spare bulb. We need that for orientation when we wake up at night in a strange location. If you do not supply a nice low wattage nightlight, I have to leave on the overhead.

    

    Remember the elegance of a 1950s motel room? Many B&Bs and vacation apartments in Europe have about as many electrical receptacles.

15. If your place is wired like a 1950s-era motel in Nebraska, please provide a power strip. I hate to crawl on the floor unplugging lamps so I can charge my phone. There should be a couple of convenient outlets for charging electronics. I should not have to put the phone in the bathroom or the iPad on the floor to charge them.

16. If controlling the television requires an 8-year-old’s insight to the medium and the ability to juggle four remote controls, provide detailed instructions on which combination is necessary to watch the morning news. Best idea: pictures of each remote with guidance on how to use it and which buttons to push so I can figure it out in a jet-lagged state when I wake up at 4:00AM.

17. Bathrooms should have decent towel bars or hooks so we can dry the towels out between uses. I hate having to hang them over the shower door or rod. So tacky. It would be nice to have access to an extra set of towels if we stay more than 2 nights. How hard is it to supply a couple of extra towels just-in-case. And don’t charge for beach towels in a resort location when you are already getting €200.00 per night from us!

Consider sleeping in your own property for a couple of nights now-and-then. See how it is to be a traveler in your rental. Can you make coffee in the morning? Do you like to hang your blouse on a twisted wire hangar? Can you read in bed? Do the pillows give you a crick in your neck? Are there enough pillows?  Is there something you miss? Your guests probably miss it too. You might be a more sympathetic landlord if you know what your guests are experiencing.

Sincerely,

GoodDayRome

P.S., Apartments we’ve loved have had:

• Great WIFI

• Lots of sturdy hangers (a dozen or more please!)

• 

  The Moka pot, Italian stalwart of the AM, must actually fit on the burner to work.

  A crockpot so we could set up dinner and return from a day of hiking to a prepared meal (only happened once and it was so appreciated!)

• More than 2 pillows

• More than one set of towels for a stay of more than 3 nights

• A Moka pot that makes two cups at a time (although we’d kill for a Nespresso machine)

• Plenty of horizontal space for computers and personal effects

• OUTLETS where they make sense! Bonus points to the apartment in London that actually provided a U.K. adapter! Double-bonus to our favorite apartment in Venezia where they have 110 and 220 outlets.

• 4-or-more wineglasses and a corkscrew

  

  SMEG makes a fine toaster in Italy, but you seldom find a toaster in a vacation rental.

• A welcome bottle of wine and chocolate (Can’t tell you how wonderful that was on a midnight arrival in San Francisco when we had last eaten a sandwich on the plane 6 hours earlier and after a transatlantic flight.)

• A toaster (rare in Europe, loved by Americans)

• Common condiments beyond salt & pepper: olive oil, balsamic vinegar, oregano, etc. so we can make a simple meal without leaving behind a month’s worth of supplies.

• 

  We love our wood hangers from IKEA. They cost next-to-nothing. When I am somewhere for a week, I want more than 3 bent hangers.

  Coat hooks by the door for our jackets

• Towel racks in the bathroom

Tags: AirBnB, HomeAway, SMEG, vacation apartments, VRBO