With Covid-19 on everyone's mind we had to be creative about what to do with our apartments to continue our passion of hosting in the long term. We focused more on direct bookings to have a better value for both guests and hosts - most platforms take a hefty 15% pay cut - and we switched some of our apartments to student rentals. While this is not a shortlet, we primarily host Erasmus/exchange students or foreign students that do their undergraduate or Master's degree at one of Lisbon's 34 universities, somewhat staying true to our general mission to share our local experience and the Portuguese culture with any visitor. We do host Portuguese from time to time, too, though more often we host Americans, Canadians, British, Germans, French, Italiens and Europeans to name a few!
When students initially contacted us to rent our apartments in Lisbon even before they arrived, they always wanted to see the apartment and did not seem to trust that we have the apartments we advertise despite various online references we have including our webpage. Honestly I started to think, why would I go through so much trouble of hosting for several years, being active on social media and launching our direct booking website including this blog? If I wanted to advertise something that did not exist surely there must be easier ways to go about this? In any case, we had some students that trusted us and booked the apartment without having been in the location physically, that are very happy about their decisions and kept an open mind when we started the discussion online.
We still do not know to this date how students or others are tricked to book non-existing accommodations. Please share your experience in our comments for other students to be alert!
We do know, however, that some of the students staying with us in the end, were tricked initially and lost their deposit if not more. If this happened to you, we do urge you to file a police report. While it may not help in your case, the more cases the police is aware of the more likely it will be that something will be done about it. The mistrust this creates sets a negative tone to start with and hosts are all put into one category instead of giving each host a neutral start when inquiring about their accommodation.
Having said that, one should not really be concerned about a direct booking and in general, keep an open mindset. If in doubt there are several things to spot or ask for to ensure the listing is genuine and the hosts have the right to let the apartment/room in question. Some are very obvious, some less. All have one goal: to mitigate losing money due to fraud, the stress this brings, and being stranded in a shortlet accommodation that I have not priced in my budget.
Here are some simple steps to follow - some of our tenants have also done with us :)
1. Google it! With the world wide web being around for some time and google, researching your landlord/host should not be that difficult. Google your landlord, the place, address, location, and neighborhood.
2. Ask for - references, especially people renting the actual apartment, platform references like Airbnb, TripAdvisor, booking.com etc. (many will have stayed before and can let you know how good or/and bad the accommodation is).
Comments
Post a Comment