Airbnb hosts are shaming guests online – but who’s really in the wrong?

Perhaps you saw the tale of the Airbnb guests who reportedly piled into a rental in Manchester city centre in June with a "van full" of pets and left behind £16,000 worth of damage, including torn clothing covered in faeces. Maybe the story of the Harry Potter-themed holiday property in Hertfordshire caught your attention. The owners returned after a booking to find "horrific" brown stains on a mattress, fixtures and fittings torn out, and frozen chips cast across the living room floor.

These cases of putative Airbnb "trashing", and many more, are in the public domain thanks to a new vogue among holiday property owners for publicly shaming badly behaved guests with so-called "white glove" or "damage walk-throughs" on video platforms such as TikTok and YouTube.

The trend began in the United States and has clocked up tens of millions of views on social media, detailing incidents including collapsed ceilings from overrunning bathtubs and disgusting messes ruining sofas and bedding.

But recently these videos are creeping into more minor infractions. Guests are being publicly shamed for what might seem like routine aspects of holiday home usage – such as failing to take out the recycling or losing a remote control amongst the sofa cushions.

The rise of post-stay shaming

In July, two US property owners, known online as Cassie and Jon, went viral after posting a TikTok video shaming a family of four, who, in the hosts' view, left a Georgia Airbnb in a state that exhibited a "lack of respect" for their rules. The guests had paid a $50 (£37) cleaning fee to the hosts, but Cassie and Jon bemoaned a remote left in the wrong place, an ottoman moved a few inches, a standing lamp that Jon claimed had been pulled out of position, a lightbulb that allegedly no longer worked, a ball in the driveway and an "unpleasant smell".

The viral post touched a nerve around uptight hosting styles, with TikTok users questioning why guests were not allowed to move furniture or use the house in an everyday way, and joking about whether guests were even allowed to sit on the toilet.

Next came the parodies, with people mocking the trend, asking "why is there a stick in the yard?", gagging in repulsion at a single can of Coca-Cola left in the fridge, or listing ridiculous pre-checkout demands – "mow the lawn, repaint the master bedroom, and lay down new tile before 10am".

The price of amateur hospitality

The response to the videos is a clear sign of the souring of the good-vibes models that amateur-host platforms, such as Airbnb, depend on. In the innocent days of the travel-sharing economy, guests and hosts were happy to forgive each other for the minor irritations and wear and tear that come with staying in real people's properties.

Over time, however, as Airbnb's reputation has tarnished, guests can feel as if they're treated as lodgers with laundry lists of checkout chores to complete even while paying premium rates for their stay. Price-tracking studies by travel industry analytics sites such as Which? show that for solo travellers and couples in major European and North American cities, hotels and serviced apartments now routinely beat Airbnb on total price for short stays.

Esther Fox, 47 and from Devon, told Telegraph Travel she had sworn off staying in properties through Airbnb after paying £2,000 for a two-week July stay in Chamonix, where the owners did not supply sufficient bedding for the family of four and their two guests, suggesting they buy their own on arrival. At checkout, the owners then tried to bill them for a crack in the wall caused by the extreme summer heatwaves, raising a grievance process with Airbnb.

But Fox had felt she was a good guest: "We took out all the rubbish, we cleared the fridge, we emptied the dishwasher, we swept through the property. We were also, of course, paying a steep cleaning fee."

Despite years of happy stays, Fox has decided against using Airbnb in the future . "Why pay that much and have all the bad will and hassle to contend with?" she says.

The desire for venting and validation

Chris Saynor is the owner-manager of Bethnal&Bec, three self-catering apartments which he rents out to holidaymakers directly via his website and via Airbnb and Booking.com. While major damage to his holiday apartments is "thankfully rare", he admits to venturing online to complain about specific incidents of guest damage, such as a guest's dog ruining outdoor cushions and beer cans exploding after being left in a freezer, which caused £60 worth of damage to an honesty bar.

"Running the holiday cabins is quite a solo job without any colleagues, so posting is a way to share my sh---y day and get empathy and validation from others in the same line of work," he told The Telegraph . "I also see it as educating the wider public about how small businesses work and the impact on people's income in cases of even minor damage."

Dr Charlotte Russell, a clinical psychologist and the founder of The Travel Psychologist blog, says that 2020s online culture rewards oversharing of what might be very minor grievances. "Shaming or judging guests in this way so publicly might feel validating in the short term, and it might even lead to increased engagement because of how algorithms work," she said. "Some might say 'any publicity is good publicity', but as a psychologist I'd be encouraging people to consider how this might look and feel to prospective guests."

Despite the fun to be had in peeking behind the doors at soiled sheets and property owners' neuroses, TikTok shaming videos, at base, point to the broken ecosystem of the sharing economy. In 2026, guests feel they are charged professional hospitality prices for an amateur service in some Airbnb stays, which come with increasingly absurd house rules. Some owners, for their part, feel aggrieved and distrustful in the face of complaints processes that favour paying guests.

Airbnb's rules state that "private information, photos, or videos of community members must not be publicly posted unless the subject of the post has given their permission".

Airbnb was contacted for comment

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