Day 15 of this bloody war and this is how it's been as an Airbnb business owner in Dubai.

Day 15 of this bloody war and this is how it's been as an Airbnb business owner in Dubai. I have over 55 units and I'm breaking it. The drones have relaxed, there are much fewer drones. We're still getting the alerts on our phones, there's still explosions, boom in the sky once in a while, and I think things really are turning back to normal, except there's still hardly anybody flying into Dubai. I have one guest who lives in Marina, she lives in a high floor up in Marina and she wanted a property on the ground. She wasn't going to accept first floor, second floor, on the ground. She's by herself but she booked one of my four bedroom townhouses. Now the four bedroom townhouse, I'm literally giving it away at like 120 pounds a night, a four bedroom townhouse. And then she was in there extending it one day, one day, and I was like, can you just let me know maybe past the day? She was like, no, I can only let you know a day at a time if I want to extend. The morning of, we send her the price, she's like, nope, the price has gone up from like 120 pounds to 130 pounds. Can you extend it at the same price? If not, then I'm out of here. And I was like, honestly babe, you're going to have to be out of here. Because when she did leave, it got booked the same day by another British guy. I don't know what his circumstances are, but it's gone for the next week. So sometimes it's the balance between trying to help guests but actually trying to help your bottom line because you are a business owner at the end of the day. My biggest expense is rent, so I've been paying rent to landlords 3 months, 4 months chunks at a time. And my thing is that if the next chunk is due anytime soon, that's going to be a big blow to my cash flow. So what do we need to do? We need to reach out to the landlords and be like, please, please, pretty please, can we change it to monthly payments? So that has been a big help. A lot of landlords have understood. Some landlords are like, oh, it's going to be, it's going to blow over in the next week, we can sort this out later. And I'm like, no, I want this in writing now because I'm not going to recover in the next one week or two weeks. Cash flow is king and I want to keep as much cash as possible in my bank account because I don't know how long this is going to last. In terms of operations on the ground, I'm not going to lie, cheap guests, last minute guests are the most difficult. They're like, why are you not giving it to me for 20 pounds a night? I'm like, come on, come on, I'm trying to remain competitive, I'm trying to give a good standard of customer service without completely killing myself. I do still have faith this war will be over soon. I know I'm like 15 days in and it's like, Sabrina, wakey wakey, but I did see in the news today that Iranian leaders kind of reached out for any kind of initiative to end the war in a fair way and I'm like, yes, yes, because I really do have faith that people will come back to Dubai. I think the more and more news getting out that it's actually quite normal here, it's okay, people aren't as scared. But I'm really, really presuming, I need to think about worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is that things do not return back to normal or it takes long enough to return back to normal that all the money in my bank is finished. I will keep you updated on how screwed we are as tourism businesses in Dubai until things pick back up again.