As co-owner, I want to respond to the guest who wrote this review and to comment about what the facts really are.
First- This guest who had a check in time of 4:00PM arrived 35 minutes early, not the 20 minutes as they stated. She even acknowledged her early arrival when she looked at her own watch at one point and said, ‘Oh. I guess I am 30 minutes early, would you like me to come back.’

When I answered the door, I greeted her by saying my usual ‘Hello, may I help you?’ It is true that I was involved in a business webinar and I mentioned to the guests that they were early for check-in and I was involved in a business related webinar but that it was ok for them to check in early. Our policy is a check in time of 4pm till 12:30am the next morning. That’s a total of 8.5 hours for a guest to pick the check-in time that best works for their schedule. Additionally, our policy is that if any guest has an arranged arrival time, and they see that they wish to check in earlier or later, we ask that the guest contact us by phone to arrange it.

We are always happy to help people with a time that works best for them because we know many B&B’s do not do that and we want to be as flexible and accommodating as possible. However, it does take some effort and responsibility of the guest to communicate their arrival plans should those travel plans change. Something this guest did not do.

The reason we ask for a check in time is to make sure we the owners/innkeepers have set aside that guests requested time of arrival for one of us, there is only 2 of us who work here, to be present at our home and to also not be busy with some other task so when guests arrive we can be there to meet them and take care getting them settled in. Most everyone in our 5+ years as owners has understood that, until this guest came along. We only wish this guest could have been a bit more understanding of us as small business owners who run a family owned business with us as the only 2 people running the B&B and all that owning your own business entails. Apparently I was wrong about that assumption with this guest.

Second- I was not rude to her as she implies, in fact I was very calm and spoke in a calm manner even though under the circumstances of this instance, and since I was the only innkeeper home, I was a bit rushed to get her settled in so I could get back to my work plus she could get on with the rest of her day so I chose to not ask a lot of questions we typically ask other guest at check-in, i.e. ‘Where you from’, ‘How was your trip’, etc.

When I did ask her about breakfast and explained that we serve breakfast between 7:30am – 9:00am she went hysterical and just began saying ‘Well is 7:30 ok, or how about 8:30 or maybe 9:00, I don’t know what time I want to eat….’ and she just kept on frantically mumbling off breakfast times. At this point I asked her if we could settle on 8:00 am since it was obvious to me that she could not make up her mind and I knew that others would be eating at that time and she could visit with the other guest.

Before I could continue with telling her about the keys and showing her to her guest room, she said that she had never stayed in a B&B before and didn’t know what to expect and how was she to get in and out of the house and was it ok to come in late because of some concert she was going to at MU. At this time I felt it I needed to try to bring the anxiety down a bit and asked in as calm as manner as I could to ‘please try to relax, I was getting to that if she would let me finish talking’. Never did I tell her to quit talking, nor would I ever do so.

The next morning at breakfast when she came down I said ‘Good Morning (guests name)’. She was rude and never even responded, not even eye contact. As I poured her a cup of coffee, she began to talk with a few of the other guest. For me, it was a new day to start fresh, but apparently not for her.

The tragic part about this is that even after the other innkeeper upon reading their review called while I was at a business meeting; this guest was additionally rude to them on the phone and refused an apology from them. Had this guests been proactive by taking the high road and communicated while they were here about their dissatisfaction we could resolved it at that time, they chose not to.