My Airbnb Journey Part II
Our plane just landed in Istanbul, Turkey. My mom, her twin sister, and I checked into our Airbnb near Sultanahmet Square to begin our 10-day vacation. And then our phones starting getting calls from family asking if we had seen the news…the European Union was shutting down flights between Europe and the US because of a global pandemic, Covid-19.
My aunt had already been in Turkey for a few weeks and she had planned to just spend a couple of days with us before her flight home. With this news, she decided to leave a day early so she could be sure her flight route would make it to the US. Istanbul is not part of the European Union, so we decided to wait it out and continue our trip around Turkey. Each day we watched the news, checked in with family, and prayed. In Istanbul, there was not much change. Stores had plenty of toilet paper and the essentials that everyone in the US seemed to be scrambling to stock up on. It wasn’t until our last 2 days in Turkey that we started to feel some affects of places taking precautions and shutting down to tourists. When we got back to the Istanbul airport to head home it was a ghost town. We had three security checks and then were on our direct flight home to O’Hare Airport in Chicago. Everyone was now wearing masks and using sanitizers and starting to be cautious of distances they stood near people. It was a strange feeling not quite knowing what we were going home to. On the news the O’Hare Airport had been a madhouse, with lines and swarms of people waiting hours and hours to get their bags and through customs. My dad and uncle drove up and left us a car, and booked us a hotel room at the airport in case we too had long waits. And we were instructed to quarantine from family for 2 weeks once we got home. As we exited the plane into the international terminal of O’Hare, there was not another plane in sight, no other people, it was eerily quite. We made it through customs, baggage claim, and got checked into our room in less than an hour!
Once I was home, my phone starting blowing up with cancellation after cancellation of booked Airbnb stays at all properties I was managing. I went into panic mode! I said a lot of prayers during that time for God to give me the strength and patience to see this through. And by the very next day, those cancellations started being replaced by new bookings! These were bookings from people that were stuck in their location. Purdue University shut down campus and sent all students to find housing off campus or go home. International students were stuck, so they booked our Airbnb for 2+ months. I opened my home in Valparaiso for first responders that needed to quarantine and it remained booked with nurses and truckers that couldn’t return home. This went on for at least a year where cancelled bookings were replaced with new bookings and longer term stays because guests had 14 day quarantine periods.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Airbnb travel has forever been changed. Guests no longer wanted to stay with the host because of the possibility of spreading disease. And guests became much more cognizant of cleanliness and sanitization of everything. Through all of these changes, I managed to keep Superhost status at all of the properties I managed! That being said, I still continue to educate myself, stay current with the travel industry, and keep my hosts informed so they can successfully run an Airbnb.
