Good Guest, Bad Guest

If you live in a popular (and expensive) city like London, you're not likely to have a shortage of house guests if you have the space to accommodate them. It's fun to have friends and family come to stay, and I do enjoy showing them around my city, but it can be tiring acting the hostess, especially if you need to carry on with your normal life (like working!) as well as spending time with guests.

A group of local friends I meet up with every week for coffee and a chat have recently been sharing experiences about 'the house guests from hell'. Our little group consists of an Australian, a Sri Lankan, a Kenyan, an Iranian, a Canadian (me), two Welsh women, and one token English woman (although not London born either) - a typical group of Londoners really. The five of us who were born abroad had a good many stories of the fun times we've had when visitors from 'back home' come to stay as most are so thoughtful, bringing gifts of things we miss from home, treating us to theatre outings and dinners with them, and generally being considerate and undemanding. Those are the ones we genuinely are sorry to see leave. But then there are the few others, often distant relatives or people we hardly know who suddenly remember our 'close friendship' after checking the costs of hotel rooms in London!

What makes a bad guest? These were some (there were some other very weird one-offs!) that got heads nodding in recognition:

Bad guests ...

• announce, often at short notice, that they will be coming to stay rather than ask if this is convenient
• bring extra guests without checking first this is ok
• expect all meals to be provided (without offering to help with buying extra food, making meals or clearing up - after all, they're on holiday!)
• assume that you are always on call to chauffer them around
• don't allow you any down time when they're in your home (telling you about their day in great detail when you've finally just settled down in the evening to watch your favourite TV show)
• invite you to join them on an outing but then stand back and let you pay their entrance fees as well as your own to a tourist attraction you've no great desire to see again
• stay longer than a few days
• and the very worst one - when you've been counting the days until they leave, they announce that they've decided to extend their stay as 'it's so relaxing at your house'!

It sounds unbelievable that any guests in a private home would ever be so thoughtless as this - but these examples of 'the things that collectively really irked us' cropped up in stories from more than one in our group. It's really too bad that a few rotten guests can spoil it for the majority of considerate guests as it has made all of us wary (and sometimes downright weary) of extending a welcome to other guests unless we know them well and they've already passed the 'good guest' test.

Home exchange guests often don't meet or overlap in one of the homes but are still guests and, as such, must respect the homes entrusted to them, leaving them as clean and tidy, if not better, than they were on their arrival. I have noticed that there seem to be more Home Base Holidays members recently indicating an interest in hospitality exchanges (you stay in my home, then I'll be a guest in your home at another time) as well as home exchanges. As it is important for hospitality hosts to make their guests feel welcome but especially important to be a thoughtful guest, perhaps we need some simple points on how to be a good guest to add to the general home exchange guidelines. Any suggestions?