Forgotten sex toys and blood-spattered sheets: Secrets of an Airbnb superhost

Telegraph

10-03-2025

What do you do when your guest leaves behind a sex toy? Or when your White Company bedlinen is spattered with blood? Or when you discover a piece of salmon defrosting in the cupboard?
'Firstly, don't panic,' says Annabel Dunstan, a chief executive and Airbnb superhost who does it the trad way, hiring out a room in her Brighton home.
She's had 12 years to practise her own advice, having started in 2013, renting out a bedroom in the family home in Oxford's Osney Island, where she was living with her partner and their children, aged 15 and 13, at the time.
'I'd left my London PR job because of the stress of commuting while trying to look after my children and my mother, who had dementia,' says Dunstan.
When her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the difficult decision was made to move both parents into residential care. During this time, Dunstan's 23-year relationship ended and while the parting was 'painful but amicable; we are still friends', it left her in 'a barn of a house with much less income'.
Early adopter
An early Airbnb adopter, she liked the idea of welcoming diverse people to her home and, 'the money was welcome, too'.
Her children raised no objections but friends were not so sure. 'The most common reaction was, 'What if they are an axe murderer?'' she says. 'I do have an inside lock on my bedroom door, but laughed inwardly when my first booking arrived; a single man carrying a long, thin, canvas bag.'
She offered to go running with him, calculating that he 'probably wouldn't murder me if I got to know him, and we just took it from there, although I never did find out what was in the bag'.
Becoming a superhost
From the outset, she resolved to become a superhost, an Airbnb-er who meets criteria that include maintaining a 4.8 or higher overall guest rating.
She puts some of her early success down to her Airbnb room – on a separate floor with its own en-suite, a double bed and panoramic Oxford views. She repeated this guesting formula after downsizing to a smaller property in the city, and later, in 2019, when she moved to her current home in Brighton.
In 12 years she has hosted over 300 guests from more than 50 countries. 'I've enjoyed them all, but some do stay in my mind more than others,' she says.
These include the embarrassed man who apologised for 'the blood' which was 'everywhere' in his room. 'He said it was a nosebleed but given that the duvet cover, duvet, sheet, pillowcase and mattress protectors had numerous blood stains, I did wonder,' says Dunstan. 'He insisted it wasn't cocaine.'
Given that her 800-threadcount White Company bedlinen resembled a TV crime scene, she could have been annoyed.
However, she says: 'I'm an anthropologist by training so I try and put myself in the other person's shoes. If I'd had a nosebleed, I would hope any host would be sympathetic and not make me feel bad.'
She accepted the guest's apologies plus £30 for cleaning costs and then 'got to work with my Marigolds and a big bottle of Vanish'.
Sex toy shock
Quick thinking also came into play when she discovered a ribbed vibrator tangled in a towel beside the Airbnb bed after a guest, who had entertained a female visitor, had departed. 'A champagne bottle was upside down in the Yucca tree pot and two glasses were upended on the Berber rug,' she remembers.
She had agreed to the guest staying once a week for eight weeks but realised, 'I didn't feel comfortable with that potentially going on with my children there every other week and so I had to deal with it.'
Via Airbnb's message service, she explained to the guest that perhaps he would be more suited to a hotel and then, wearing latex gloves, popped the sex toy in a Jiffy bag before parcelling it up and couriering it, marked private and confidential, to his workplace.
Dealing with dodgy smells
She had to think on her feet again, when a disgusting smell pervaded the Brighton house one summer, following the departure of a young student guest. 'At first it was just a faint whiff but by day three it was awful.'
She returned to the guest's room and opened a little-used cupboard in there. After being hit by a monumental stench, she discovered a decomposing salmon fillet. 'I'm happy for guests to use my kitchen so I think he must have put it in there to defrost and cook later and just forgotten,' she says. Another guest used an inordinate amount of Lynx aftershave, to the point where she could smell it 'all over the house'.
One Scandinavian gentleman spent a large part of his 10-day visit sitting at Dunstan's kitchen table. 'He said very little and didn't seem to sleep much but his partner did.'
It was only after they left that Dunstan's son discovered all the lawnmower cables, a rope length and twine in the garden shed neatly fashioned into coils, braids and plaits. 'Anything that could be knotted had been, along with all the elastic bands and bags for life in our kitchen cupboard.'
Ukrainian visitor
The visitor she's been most moved by was a young Ukrainian woman who had fled Kharkiv for Oxford, sharing a room with her mother. 'My friend asked if I could offer the daughter a break in Brighton and of course I agreed,' says Dunstan.
She was struck by the quiet elegance of the woman who, before she was uprooted by the Russian invasion, was a healthcare professional who had lived in her own flat.
'We went into the garden and a flock of seagulls squawked overhead in the blue sky,' remembers Dunstan. 'She looked at me and whispered: 'It's so nice to hear seagulls and not rockets in the air above.''
All these experiences, she says, 'gave me back my mojo. I'd been in a time of stress and grief when I started – my father died soon after he went into care – but slowly, I climbed out of it.'
Self-belief
Successful superhosting gave her the self-belief to relocate to Brighton which, in turn, led to her taking up year-round sea-swimming and fulfilling her ambition to learn the saxophone, which she now plays in a jazz band.
Appearing on stage gave her the confidence to start performing some of her Airbnb stories at open mic sessions, under the name #HashtagSuperhost and she has just published her Confessions of a Superhost book on Amazon. 'The stories I've written are based on true events, but names, details and identifiable traits have been changed to protect the privacy and anonymity of those involved,' she explains.
She also launched and still runs an insights agency, Question & Retain, measuring employee and client experience.
'Superhosting has given and taught me so many things – but mainly that humans are curious and endlessly fascinating,' she says.