How to rent your home out on Airbnb
Thinking of taking in paying guests? Three veteran Vancouver hosts share tricks of the trade Emily Plommer knew from her own experience staying at Airbnbs that it was frustrating to rent an apartment with a full kitchen and discover that there wasn’t so much as a salt shaker or bottle of cooking oil in the cupboards. So when Plommer, an avid traveller and then 26-year-old women’s studies grad, decided to make a living through hosting two years ago, she made sure the rental suite in her house in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood was well provisioned. Pots and pans and utensils. Basic cooking supplies , like oil and some spices. Milk and cereal. Coffee beans. Fresh fruit. Eggs. Then she found that she was making a lot of banana bread with the leftover, disintegrating fruit or eating the cereal herself. “It was funny how people would book a place like this and then eat nothing at home,” Plommer says. “In the end, I just asked, ‘Will you be eating breakfast here?’ before leaving things...