Winter and Spring Residencies: Why Guest Haven isn’t listed on Airbnb anymore
The Stone’s Throw Guest Haven still has a few 1- to 4-week openings this winter and spring. We may soon post our Permaculture Residency Calendar via an education scheduling app. But for now, just call or email to hear the available weeks.
All Residencies: Staying at the Guest Haven gives you an opportunity to learn firsthand about “yard farming”, permaculture, and local food systems. The Guest Haven has been a cozy home base providing farm-stay lodging for vacationers, people in the region on business trips, contract workers, students needing temporary housing, and many more. We’re a 5-minute drive to the Gallatin International Airport, and 15 minutes to Bozeman, Montana. Help with a few microfarm projects and get up to $200 off a 1-week stay, or up to $800 off a 4-week stay.
Minimum/Maximum Stay: 1 week to 1 month
Work-and-Earn hours required for rebates: 14 hours per week
Winter Residencies: There’s a lot happening in winter! Learn about food preservation, seed saving and sorting, seed testing, planting bed maps, and early veggie starts. Touring the planting zones is fascinating during the winter. Learn about plant dormancy, tree roots, what the local birds are doing, and how we help the beneficial predator bugs that over-winter here.
Spring Residencies: It’s all hands on-deck as soon as the snow thaws—and even before then! Pruning happens as early as February, veggie seedlings are started in Feb/March, and planting in the tiny the hoop house begins as early as mid-March. Early perennial crops begin growing as early as late March. Cold hardy veggies are planted outdoors as early as April/May. Tours are a delight as the perennials and trees begin to wake up.
What happened to the Airbnb and Homestay listings?
We’re no longer on those booking apps for significant reasons. We got decent traffic from both, and we were consistently 5-star rated on Airbnb. But guests were increasingly hard on the room. Many didn’t care about the microfarm and our values. In some cases, people smoked in the room. I have asthma; not good!
In short, we had concerns about:
Respect for the Space: Eventually, about half our app-referred guests were truly not into permaculture, didn’t care about the microfarm, and treated the room poorly.
Expensive Non-covered Damages: Hosting apps were hit-or-miss in their coverage of guest-related damages. That left us with guest stays that cost us MORE than they brought in. That was unsustainable.
Unkind Treatment of People with Disabilities: Hosting apps penalize (and even block!) guests who try to contact hosts outside the app. People with disabilities often NEED to tour a room to confirm whether it is “accessible enough” for them. Ultimately, these apps require differently-abled people to pay a reservation fee to gain access and confirm a space will work for them. If a space isn’t perfect, they are free to cancel, but they lose the reservation fee paid to the app! Then they repeat the process with another property. In practice, the apps make extra money off people who have disabilities. That is not right! It amounts to a disability tax!
It all came down to dehumanization—of us and our guests. The apps did not let us connect closely with each guest in advance of each reservation. With Airbnb particularly, your property is promoted (higher on list) only if you agree to “Instant Book”, which translates into saying “yes” to guests without screening them at all! Ultimately, guests and hosts aren’t allowed to provide all the information needed to make wise decisions.
While these apps let us connect with people we never would have met any other way, it also dehumanized the pathway toward that connection, which resulted in a lot of “bad egg” encounters. Eventually the hardships dramatically outweighed the benefits.
So we’re done with room-booking apps. Our Guest Haven Residencies now involve a short PDF application, request for references, a get-to-know-you conversation, and a refundable damage deposit. There is NO application fee. Everything is person-to-person. It’s going so much better that way.
Thanks everyone for understanding. If you’re interested in lodging (and learning), connect with us one-to-one from now on.
Hope to see you soon!
Anika Hanisch