The best hosts welcome you and thereafter show up when you have an issue. The worst hosts are ever-present and overbearing. This a story of the latter. Shirley does not want to be your host - she wants to be your college RA.
Overbearing. There are over 20 laminated signs, representing >100 lines of house rules, taped to walls in the house with rules they expect you to follow, including cleaning and mopping the house daily. After we signed on Airbnb (without acknowledgement of onerous expectations), Shirley 1) tried sneak ~10 lines of house rules in an off-Airbnb short term agreement (ST rental agreement was needed for tax purposes); 2) texted me multiple different house rules list over multiple days at the start of the stay; 3) suggested many times over text over next several weeks that we mop and clean the house daily.
High anxiety, panicky, and miserly. We booked the place for 10 weeks - a ~$10k stay. We agreed to spend an extra $200 for midstay cleaning. There was a technical issue with Airbnb's website, delaying payment. Shirley texted and called me that evening, texted and called me that morning, and reported it to Airbnb, who called me to remind me that I had agreed to the midstay cleaning and that I needed to pay it. She simply would not listen that there was a tech issue. I offered to pay over venmo - she was rabid in her pursuit of the $200 (on a ~$10k stay).
She also suggested that if we wanted to do laundry more than 1x / week, we would need to pay $20 per load. For the once per week we could wash clothes, she encouraged us to combine loads across our household so we could use one wash cycle only.
Fun fact**: we paid the $200 for professional midstay cleaning as agreed, but she had her son and husband do the midstay cleaning instead of professional cleaners. ($200 for maybe 700 sqft of space, by the way).
Slow internet. We thankfully brought an eero mesh router with us. Their range extender was offline >10x / day (needed reset every few minutes) and internet speeds were ~10mbps down, ~1mbps up - unusable for work. The eero made it workable.
Potential bed bugs? 4 weeks in, my sister started getting bites. Shirley was quick to suggest it may be due to eating in the room / crumbs, but coincidentally had bed bug spray on hand to provide same-day.
Verbose and stubborn. Good luck trying to be reasonable and communicate.
The location is great, and the accessory living area has potential. Shirley is well-intentioned, but her demeanor and anxiety made her a bad host. They just simply shouldn't put this unit on Airbnb.