Hi there,
Here we go with the stories…
- Aydin, the Turk who was worse than a child
When I bought my apartment in Valencia, a friend who was an Airbnb host told me to rent a room on that platform to earn extra money since I was unemployed at the time.
Aydin was my first guest, and he came from Istanbul to do an internship in Valencia.
When he got out of the taxi in front of my building, the first thing I noticed, apart from the fact that he was ugly, was the smell of his armpits. I don’t remember his age, but I think he was 20 or 21 years old.
After I showed him his room and gave him a tour of the apartment, he asked me about the “house rules” and I told him that I didn’t have anything written down but that the rules were “normal behavior”.
At that time, I worked as an instructor in gyms and usually arrived late at night after the classes. The day Aydin arrived, I went out to dinner with a friend and got home at midnight. When I walk in, Aydin is waving at me to keep my voice down because her friend was asleep drunk on my couch.
I told him that I didn’t care, to wake her up and to get her the hell out of my house. Things started badly.
Initially he spoke very good English and when he told me that he had studied industrial engineering, I imagined that he would be smart. But not at all, from the first moment he was not able to open either the door of the building or the apartment, so he kept calling me on the phone because he couldn’t get in and “the key didn’t work”. So, in the end I didn’t even answer his calls anymore.
The first day he asked my permission to take 3 of my eggs and already assumed that he could take as much as he wanted from my food at all times. The idea that he had was to share everything as if we were best friends, but I didn’t touch anything of his food and I was mad that he used mine. So, I had to put everything under lock.
When he cooked, he used all the kitchen utensils and left everything dirty while he ate and rested. So, I had to wait hours to use the kitchen. Also, every day he left the bowl where he ate his breakfast cereal unwashed.
It was the clumsiest thing there was: he always tripped, broke something, dropped something. In fact, one day, entering from the terrace, he hit the blind with his head so hard that the walls were shaking, I don’t know how he didn’t break his head. (I always laugh when I remember).
He came from his internship at 15h and went to sleep until 22h and between midnight and one in the morning, he took a shower. The bathroom in that apartment was between the two rooms and with the terrible quality of constructions in Spain, you could hear everything and obviously his showers woke me up.
In addition, every time he entered the bathroom, he spent an hour there.
When he took a shower, he would remove the rug that I had in the bathroom because it was “wet from my feet”, leaving the entire bathroom flooded. I had to wait for him to get dressed and do all his things so that he could deign to clean up what he had wet.
Imagine how the tension was rising in that “coexistence”. Also, the guy was getting dumber and clumsier. Even the good level of English that he had was completely lost and when I argued with him, he couldn’t even get the words out.
After a month I made a list with the house rules, but it didn’t matter anymore, his stupidity had no limits and it made me more and more disgusted.
After a month, he hadn’t even cleaned his room “because he thought I was going to clean it for him.”
I think the internship lasted 6 months and he didn’t even spend two in my house. After escalating everything with Airbnb I canceled the reservation and Airbnb paid me about $400 for the damage he had done. At that time Airbnb worked moderately well.
When he left, I was having lunch with Diego on the terrace and we even felt bad for him, but I couldn’t take it anymore with his infinite stupidity; plus, it had been almost two months and he still couldn’t open the doors on his own.
With this experience I paid for the hazing and learned that guests do not necessarily have to be normal, and it is quite possible that a lot of them are not. Also, I made my list of rules for future reservations.
- Patrick, the English with a disgusting skin disease
I never activated the automatic reservation because when they contacted me, I liked to review the profiles well to decide whether to accept the reservation.
I got a request from an Englishman named Patrick and he had only positive reviews. This guy was supposedly traveling the world. Since he was English, I imagined he was going to be clean and polite.
He arrived and immediately went into his room.
When I rented the room to men, Diego usually stayed with me that first night, just in case. Well, we went to sleep around midnight, and I turned off the systems that I used for work (internet included). As we were falling asleep, there was a knock on the door from the guy who hadn’t been out of the room since check-in. He told me to please put the internet back on because he needed to work.
This guy who was “traveling the world” in a week only went out once to go to the supermarket.
He ate once every two days. His diet consisted of rice and scrambled eggs with hot sauce. The first time he cooked, he scratched my pan, so I immediately opened a case with Airbnb so he would pay for it.
The situation was very strange.
One afternoon when Diego was home, the guy strangely came out of his room to pour himself a glass of water and Diego asked him how many places he had already visited in Valencia and Patrick left with the excuse that he had a bit of a cold and was waiting to get well to go sightseeing.
When he was walking to his room, we realized that he had a very large gray spot on the back of his neck as if from some skin disease.
That’s when I started to feel disgusted being in my own house, so I went to Diego’s house. I would come to my house to work from 9 to 18h and then Diego would pick me up to go to his house to sleep. The weekend I also stayed at Diego’s house. A very surreal situation.
I think the guy was staying at my house for two weeks or less. In that time, he only went out to the supermarket once, he only took a shower once during the weekend when I went to Diego’s house, he ate only once every two days and went to the bathroom about once every 3 days (even less). Nor did he brush his teeth or washed his face daily.
He made a request to extend the reservation for another week and I refused. I just wanted him to leave my house.
But the worst was when he checked out. When I opened the door to the room a smelly steam came out, so I went to put on a plastic suit, gloves, masks, and glasses (the kind used for painting).
At that time, I did the cleaning of the room because it didn’t cost me anything and because most people didn’t even mess.
Not even Lucifer has ever seen what I found in that room. Apparently, the guy had some nasty disease, and his skin was peeling off. I swear to you, the entire floor, the bed, the slippers, the armchairs, were covered with dry skin. Not even Harry Potter’s basilisk would have been capable of so much.
Also, he never opened the window for almost two weeks. The air was thick, and the sheets looked damp.
Imagine the terrifying report I sent to Airbnb.
I had to throw out the pillows, the sheets, the rug, the slippers, the mattress pad. Everything went in the trash because not even washing it I would be capable of put it on for other guests.
Airbnb didn’t pay me for anything I had to buy back because “they weren’t going to charge the guest for having a skin condition.”
After I threw everything in the trash, I spent a week cleaning up because the room kept disgusting me. In addition, the window was open for a month in the middle of winter to ventilate all that macabre air.
Airbnb not only had to pay me for everything I had to buy, but also the therapy with the psychologist.
- The Chinese who took showers at 3 in the morning
I got a reservation from 2 Chinese women for the week of fallas (a festivity in Valencia). They had been in Valencia for two weeks and had been told to stay longer to see the fallas.
The first thing is that I didn’t understand why waste so much time in Valencia when in two days you can see everything.
The women were between 40 and 50 years old and spent the whole day stuck in the house. Perhaps they would go out for a half hour for a walk and come back. That is, they saw very little of The Fallas.
Even though they were stuck in the house all day, they showered at 3 in the morning and spent an hour each in the bathroom. A nightmare.
I told them to take a shower at a decent hour because I went to bed at 22h. Still, when they got into the bathroom, they were there for two hours.
They made all their meals at home and to prepare something as simple as a bowl of oatmeal, they used 4 pots, 7 plates, strainers, lids, and everything. They also left everything there to wash it after eating quietly.
Besides, it was one of the two that did everything and the other didn’t lift a finger.
They were very nice and one day they even invited me to eat with them, but they disgusted me, and I couldn’t wait for them to leave.
Nowadays I can’t understand how people rent a room and they are so abnormal. It’s just that, even if you rent the entire apartment, you can’t take a shower at 3 in the morning because you’re disturbing the neighbors.
Then I had a wonderful Romanian guest who looked like Mads Mikkelsen in the Hannibal series and a very nice German; both impeccable. But when I got a job, I stopped renting the room because the money I was getting didn’t compensate for the psychological wear and tear of bad guests.