How do you gauge a potential guest’s “dust tolerance”?

English Forum Community 🤔 Q&As: Ask the community
1

I’m hoping to receive your advice about the following: how do you establish whether a potential guest’s expectations around cleanliness are compatible with your home?

We currently have guests staying in our house. Before agreeing to the exchange, we had quite an extensive Zoom call. I explained that we don’t charge cleaning fees and we don’t have professional cleaners between exchanges. We rely on the previous guest to leave the house clean for the next one, which inevitably means that standards can vary from one guest to another. I always check between guests, but in this case I was not able to get it organised in the few hours between departure and arrival.

Our guest describes himself as “easy going” and said he was completely comfortable taking the risk. Unfortunately, the previous guests forgot to take out the rubbish before leaving. Not ideal, and I completely understand that this is an unpleasant surprise to find after a long journey.

This initial problem triggered a very detailed inspection of the entire house. Since then, I’ve received well over 100 WhatsApp messages and photos documenting dust, marks, corners, surfaces and other imperfections around the house.

For future exchanges, I’d therefore like to find a polite way of discovering someone’s dust-tolerance level before we agree to host them :sweat_smile: . What makes it difficult is that we don’t charge many Guest Points so some guests may not have many alternatives and would say anything to secure their spot, like in this case.

I’m genuinely interested in how others manage this. I’d much rather discover that our expectations are incompatible before an exchange than have either side spend their holiday frustrated afterwards.

2

Hi PieterK,

is this a guest that’s on HomeExchange for long? Does (s) he know not to expect a hotel clean home?
I think in your case, I would just put in my profile a description in the way you worded it here, something like: “We don’t charge cleaning fees and we don’t have professional cleaners between exchanges. We rely on the previous guest to leave the house clean for the next one, which inevitably means that standards can vary from one guest to another. Though I try to always check between guests, it’s not possible every time. This will be communicated beforehand. However, we do hope our guest’s dust-tolerance level before is not too low :sweat_smile:”
Some guests will be relieved that they don’t have to clean to a hotel standard, and guests that do like these standard maybe shouldn’t visit your home.

3

He has done many exchanges but only short term in one-bedroom apartments with cleaning fee. I am thinking of asking him to leave a 1-star rating for cleanliness to help future guests make better decisions.

4

I would not do that! A one star review might put off members who would be perfectly fine staying at your place. If he wants to give you one star, he will do that.

You have not given the link to your home, but if all your other reviws show 5 stars on cleanliness, I think you will be rather fine no matter what your guest does.
And if it turns out the review is very unfair, you can always respond to it.