Sleep is a host's right too.

I have learned to sleep with my phone within reach, the volume up and vibration on. One night, in the middle of a dispute with a guest, I was woken by a message from a platform's customer support team. I had one hour to submit my side of the story before the case moved forward. Still half asleep, I tried to piece together what had happened, look through conversations and gather information. I asked to continue later because I needed to rest and put the facts in order. The possibility that a decision would be made without my account remained. The person writing to me was at work. I was in bed.

After more than ten years of welcoming guests and managing short-term rentals, I find myself asking when we started treating sleep as an interruption of service. When hosting someone began to demand a kind of availability that takes over the night, spills into every other part of life and makes the silence of someone resting look suspicious. How much of our lives we are expected to hand over with each booking.

Behind every short-term rental lie very different realities. I know people who rent out their own homes and leave with a small suitcase to sleep at a relative's place so they can make ends meet. There are retirees who rely on an apartment to help cover their expenses, people who rent out a room in their home and property managers who have made this their main occupation. All of them have obligations, relationships and a body that needs sleep. On a platform, that diversity is reduced to a listing with photos, a price, amenities and a calendar. Comparing properties is easy. The human conditions that keep them available are far less visible.

The hotel industry has structures in place to organize overnight service. Front desk staff, night auditors, duty managers and rotating shifts make it possible to spread coverage whose cost is built into the operation. In short-term rentals run by a single person, that same expectation can fall on someone who has already been working all day. A property manager may run apartments in several buildings without a receptionist in any of them. A host may check in a guest at four in the morning and get up a few hours later to go to another job. A booking promises a service and creates none of the shifts needed to sustain it. When there is no one to take over, the continuity of service ends up being paid for with someone's sleep.

Booking accommodation involves rights and commitments that must be honored. Conditions have to be clear, what is advertised has to exist and problems deserve attention. An emergency may call for immediate action. That is precisely why it matters to tell it apart from a question that can wait. When everything demands the same urgency, the rest of the person providing the service becomes subordinate to the next notification.

I have met guests who seem to treat their choice as a favor deserving endless gratitude. In that logic, having booked grants them additional authority over the person hosting them. They ask for exceptions, try to change what was agreed or expect replies at any hour. The expectation can also work in silence. Hosts know their reputation keeps their business going. A late-night delay can be read as a lack of care, and a reasonable refusal can turn into a complaint. The fear of a bad review starts working long before anyone writes one, and it shapes how much we accept and how late we keep answering.

Platforms are part of this relationship. Response metrics make speed visible while saying much less about the conditions under which it is achieved. A number can record how long we took to reply without showing what we had to interrupt to do so. When speed becomes a permanent expectation, being reachable at all times starts to look like a measure of our dedication.

I am speaking about things I have lived through, without extending them to every platform or confusing them with the usual timeframes for communicating with guests. What I question is having to choose between staying asleep and taking part in a decision that affects me. An hour available on the clock can be an hour out of reach in real life. I have also seen notices in some chats indicating that the other person is probably resting. The tools already know how to recognize the night. It is hard to understand why that night stops mattering once a complaint comes in.

This is how you learn to sleep on standby. Sound on, vibration on, screen within reach. Even when no message arrives, the possibility remains. The night becomes a watch kept by the fear of losing income, reputation or the chance to be heard. I read this as a form of extraction of personal time. An operation can benefit from our constant attention while the cost builds up outside its metrics, in hours of broken sleep and in a life that is never fully free.

The debate around the right to disconnect has gained ground in different countries and employment frameworks. It raises a question worth asking in independent hosting as well. How do we protect the rest of people who depend on a platform to work? Being independent does not make their time limitless, nor does it remove the need to set limits on availability.

There are possible, concrete measures. Deadlines for hosts to give their side of a case could take into account the night in their time zone, without preventing whatever immediate action a genuine emergency requires. Platforms could clearly define what counts as an emergency and what can wait, and communicate this to guests before their trip. Response metrics could exclude overnight hours or be measured against service hours declared by each host. And anyone who wants to offer round-the-clock coverage should be able to do so through organized shifts, instead of sustaining it with their own body.

Serving requires attention, craft and judgment. Servility begins when keeping an income means setting aside basic needs, when sleeping or asking for time to understand a case becomes something you have to beg for. I worry that we have normalized this demand so thoroughly that exhaustion looks like a personal failing and asking for rest is seen as a lack of commitment. Round-the-clock service needs organization, coverage and resources. Whoever promises it should ask how it is sustained and who absorbs its cost. A person's endurance has a limit, even if their phone can stay on all night.

I want my guests to rest, enjoy themselves and find what I promised them. I also want to go to bed without calculating what I might lose while I sleep. An industry devoted to welcoming people should recognize, with the same seriousness, the humanity of those who do the welcoming. A host's life goes on beyond every booking and deserves to keep a space of its own.

The next time my phone rings in the early hours, I want to tell an emergency apart from a demand that can wait. Take care of what is necessary and close my eyes again. No night I sell should come with mine included.