People tend to find what they look for!

When it comes to how you’re feeling when you arrive at the villa, this next point is very important!

When you arrive at your villa, hoping and expecting everything to be just perfect… if you find something wrong… even if you just think you’ve found something wrong… you’ll tend to look for more things wrong to justify your feelings. That’s just human nature.

Want an example? (This one is from real life with a guest.) Complaining about a lamp not working, instead of walking over to the wall switch that controls the outlet it’s plugged into and just turning it on. If you’re in a positive frame of mind, you’ll look for the switch. In a negative frame of mind and you’ll complain to your host the lamp isn’t working.

Yes, you may find these switches at our villa, and we can’t control how every guest may have moved or plugged in a lamp. Perhaps they just preferred it that way.

The thing is, if you’re looking for things to complain about, you’ll likely find them. That’s just natural too, because nothing is perfect.

This is just as true as the opposite tendency; if you’re looking for things to be excited and pleased about, you’ll find them as well.

As people, we tend to find, and focus, on what we look for.

Conversely, we tend to ignore anything that doesn’t support what we’re feeling at any particular moment. If we’re feeling disappointment, we’ll ignore all the reasons why we should be pleased and satisfied. If we’re happy and excited, we’ll ignore things that might disappoint us.

So how are you feeling?

Without even realizing it, it is altogether possible that when you arrive, you may subconsciously be looking for things to be wrong, for reasons completely unrelated to the accommodations.

For example, maybe your trip, and even your accommodations, are costing a lot of money, and you’re not happy about that. So you look for reasons to be dissatisfied with your accommodations, so you can justify in your mind that you’re paying too much for them.

Such a situation has much less to do with how much we charge, and much more to do with how comfortable you are with the budget for your trip.

It’s weird, but this is how people’s brains work.

If you think you’re disappointed with your vacation rental accommodations, no matter what the reason at first, you’ll find lots of reasons to be disappointed and dissatisfied. That is  as common and predictable as the sun rising and falling each day.

Part of The Crash Course in being a Great Vacation Rental Guest!

Want to know what the biggest contributor to Guest Disappointment on Arrival is? You may be surprised to learn it’s this!