Please look after this Bnb: You expect house rules, but these notes are openly hostile. Photo / TikTok, Becky Levin Navarro
Please look after this Bnb: You expect house rules, but these notes are openly hostile. Photo / TikTok, Becky Levin Navarro
“Thank U for doing the washing up! xxx”
As a guest in another person’s home, you expect house rules, but these notes are gleefully hostile. Worse still is the quantity of ‘cordial’ warning signs.
The rise of holiday rental websites like Airbnb and Bookabach etc have meant that there are more people leasing out spare rooms, holiday homes and baches than ever before. The self-check-in etiquette and invention of lock boxes can mean you don’t always get to meet your guests first-hand. It makes sense to leave a few notes and written pointers around to help guests make themselves at home. Nobody really reads the compendium.
But there are points when this goes way beyond instructions for the dodgy microwave or “Nothing but loo paper, 1s and 2s”.
Recently, this horror was shared in a TikTok reel in which a person discovers “every room and every surface” of their rental covered in laminated edicts.
“Is there a cap on how many rules can be displayed at Airbnbs?” they asked.
Giving a 90-second tour of the rented apartment, they reeled off as many of the notes as possible, which ranged from petty to vaguely threatening.
“Decorative piece. Do not touch or move for ANY REASON”, screamed the sign on a changing screen.
“Absolutely NO JUMPING on beds” read another above the headboards, threatening to pass on costs of damages to guests.
In the kitchen, large sections of storage were declared off-limits, with “Shelves owners’ use only” written on them - including arrows for extra, don’t-even-think-about-it emphasis.
Perhaps the most egregious was the use of emotional blackmail on the wooden dining table.
“This was our grandmother’s table. Please be kind to it and use a placemat.”
Y’all I dont get it 🤯 We stayed at an airbnb / vrbo house with another family over the weekend. The rules displayed all over the house just killed me. It seemed like every room and every surface had a note. It almost felt like it wasn’t a vacation with So. Many. Rules. #airbnb#vrbo#summervacation
The clip, which has amassed almost four million views in the past week, clearly struck a chord with the millions of holidaymakers who turn up to discover rules taped all over their rental like a crime scene. Or worse still, a lengthy list of chores to complete during their stay.
There is a certain art to hosts leaving messages for guests without giving them the impression the host is haunting them.
It’s said that a host’s holiday home is their castle. For some of the more exotic listings available to let, this is more than literal.
You have a right to feel protective - but if you care that much about the running of your bach, should you really be letting it out to strangers?
There’s something deeply unsettling about your wardrobe declaring: “I’m fragile, please don’t pull on my knobs.”
Bnbs are full of notes written from the cheery perspective of chattel and whiteware. They all seem to have the same polite yet firm tone, and they know what they want: “Please put me away, when you’re done!” “Please don’t over-fill me.”
Beyond being vaguely patronising, it leaves guests with the feeling they have checked into Snow White’s enchanted cottage or a Disney animation by mistake.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a dishwasher or a Hoover with a dodgy filter - these objects should not have opinions of their own.
Vacuum cleaners should not have opinions of their own. Photo / Tnarik Innael, Creative Commons
Painted pebbles and ‘cutesy’ missives
Your beach house is your ‘special place’, we get it. Your wall art and visitor compendium have told us as much.
It’s only natural that a rental host wants to leave something of their personality around the house. It can be charming. If you didn’t want it, you would have checked into a capsule motel. It’s something that rental platforms are always encouraging hosts to do - telling them to “put their whole selves” into their rental, along with hard work and home bakes, while taking 15 per cent or more of the booking and service fees.
So-called “word art” is less about practical instruction and more about conveying a sense of wellbeing (“It’s a vibe.”).
You’ll find painted pebbles and motivational quotes daubed onto wall murals, or else put into keepsake frames and left on bedside tables. It is more pervasive in Northland holiday rentals than black mould.
“Live. Laugh. Love,” or “Community. Identity. Stability.”
Such slogans could just as easily be attributed to Audrey Hepburn or Big Brother.
Though not strictly a note from the host, they can be equally disturbing.
It’s like being haunted by the ghost of Kmart Living.
Chores set by Airbnb hosts have become a source of contention.
Should we be expected to do the laundry and mow the host’s lawn when we’ve already been charged a $100 cleaning fee?
I think it’s only fair that guests do some upkeep if they’re using a house, but you need to set reasonable expectations.
“Please take out the bins when you leave” fits neatly on to a sticky note.
“Please sort these boxes of 10 years’ worth of mail-order catalogues into the recycling at the bottom of the road, past the unchained billy goat (who bites)” does not.
Passive-aggressive prompts
There’s no better way to make guests feel like indentured labour than pre-emptively thanking them for tasks as you set them. It’s manipulative.
Still, Bnbs are full of such militantly polite notices.
“Thanks for doing the washing up” written on the drying rack, or a laminated “Thank you for not smoking in our house” are prime examples.
It gives guests the illusion of freedom that they might have ever left their dishes undone. It breeds resentment. It’s the same reason why footservants are never thanked. Imagine if Hugh Bonneville left such notes around Downton Abbey? The next day it would be the guillotine.
Worse still, you feel obliged to follow them, having been asked so nicely.
